Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of the antique. In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with imitation, they came in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his manner. Thus the first draught of Goethe's "Goetz von Berlichingen" conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian "history." The unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley variety of figures, humors, and conditions--knights, citizens, soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give it a more independent form. Scherer[9] says that the pronunciamento of the new national movement in German letters was the "small, badly printed anonymous book" entitled "Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blaetter" ("Some Loose Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained essays by Justus Moeser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who "celebrated the merits of popular song, advocated a collection of the German _Volkslieder_, extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a German Shakspere"; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and "asserted that art, to be true, must be characteristic. The reform, or revolution, which this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and with a friendly attitude toward England. . . This great movement was, in fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and rationalism to feeling and faith, from _a priori_ notions[11] to history, from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's 'Goetz' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much attention, but the 'Fly-sheets on German Style and Art' preceded the publication of 'Goetz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate talent but shallow genius, the representative of the _Aufklaerung_