Here of course the charm arises from the fact that the image is _new_, personal—that is to say, that it is _literary_. The curves of the wind-engrailed surge on the sand are not Vida’s “stealings,” they are originals—whoso takes them will not make them, though in themselves they remain delightful for ever. They are like the “chrysoprase” eyes of Clarimonde in Gautier’s _Morte Amoureuse_, which make that piece immortal. The man who _now_ gives us eyes of chrysoprase might as well make them gooseberries. Lessing does not say this, does not hint it: indeed (as Lamb’s Scotchman would point out) it would have been, in reference to the _Morte Amoureuse_, impossible for him to do so. But he is on the way to saying it, and he instigates others to do so if he does not.[56] [Sidenote: Hamlet _and_ Semiramis.] The objection indeed which may be most justly taken to these dramatic and artistic preoccupations is that they too often directly prevent him in this way from doing what he might have done. The _Dramaturgie_ is to the student of properly literary criticism a mixture of irritation and delight—a parallel to Coleridge’s conversation, in which “glorious” literary “islets” constantly loom through the dramatic haze, and then get engulfed again. How admirable in principle that comparison[57] of Voltaire’s and of Shakespeare’s ghosts! Yet how we sigh for concrete illustrations from the actual _words_—for a little, little _Zusammensetzung_, say, of “This eternal blazon,” —three words only, but three words with the whole soul of poetry in them, and of “Arrête! et respecte ma cendre.”[58] [Sidenote: _The_ Comte d’Essex, Rodogune, Mérope.] The defence of Thomas Corneille’s _Comte d’Essex_[59] against Voltaire’s unhistorical history is very good; but then it is so unnecessary! and in the longest criticisms of all, those given to the greater Corneille s _Rodogune_[60] and to Maffei’s and Voltaire’s _Merope_[61] (once more one wishes that Lessing could have taken in Mr Arnold’s), the entanglements of the preoccupation reach, for a literary critic, the exasperating. [Sidenote: _Lessing’s Gallophobia_]