Let me, however, assure any of my readers who are apt to regard as “unfriendly” or “unsympathetic” criticism which is not eulogy thick and slab, neat and unmixed, that there is no intention here of belittling Lessing’s critical qualities,[86] only one of indicating critically what they were and what they were not. The gift of critical expression he most certainly had in a very high degree. His exposition is masterly: though he is constantly, as has been said, leading the discussion aside from concrete to abstract, and from particular to general points, he is scarcely ever obscure, confused, or vague. His language is precise, without being technical or jargonish. He has something of the German lack of urbanity, but he often has a felicity of expression that is French rather than German, with depth and humour which are far more German than French. Never has one of the tricks of the critical pedant— common to the kind in our day as in his—been so happily described as in the opening of _Wie die Alten den Tod gebildeten_: “Herr Klotz always thinks he is at my heels. But when I look back at his yelp, I see him lost in a cloud of dust quite astray from the road I have trodden.”[87] The unlucky distraction of his later years, to theological or anti-theological squabbling may—nay, must—have lost us much. But as it is, he never fails for long together to give those _fermenta cognitionis_ of which he speaks. He is always “for thoughts”: that fecundity, as a result of the critical congress, which we shall remark in his part-master Diderot, is everywhere present in him. [Sidenote: _Frederic the Great._] Lessing, whom the king neglected, may suggest Frederic the Great, whose _De la Littérature Allemande_ (1780) the Germans have most forgivingly translated into the language despised by the writer, and adopted as a “monument” of its literature.[88] It is certainly a monument of a kind, and the most striking contrast possible to Lessing’s work. I shall not say that it shows, as a Carlylian not less fervent than myself[89] has admitted of Frederic’s historian on Marryat, that Frederic “was stupid for once in his life.” But it certainly shows that he could be absurdly narrow and perverse, and could push the confidence of ignorance to a wonderful length. That Frederic _was_ very ignorant of literature there is no doubt. It is known that he “had small Latin[90] and _no_ Greek”; his expressions about English, the language and the literature, in this very tractatule, are, if possible, more impudently ignorant than those about German: he does not, I think, so much as name a Spanish author; and his references to Italian might have been, and probably were, derived from mere hearsay.