permanently estranged from the tastes and sympathies of the educated classes, the fault was by no means entirely its own and that of its patron the populace. The times were evil times for a national effort of any kind; and poetic literature was in all its branches passing into the hands of scholars who were often pedants, and whose language was a jargon of learned affectations. Thus things continued, till the awful visitation of the Thirty Years' War cast a general blight upon the national life, and the traditions of the popular theatre were left to the guardianship of the marionettes (_Puppenspiele_)! The literary drama of the 17th century. When, in the midst of that war, German poets once more began to essay the dramatic form, the national drama was left outside their range of vision. M. Opitz, who holds an honoured place in the history of the German language and literature, in this branch of his labours contented himself with translations of classical dramas and of Italian pastorals--among the latter one of Rinuccini's _Daphne_, with which the history of the opera in Germany begins. A. Gryphius, though as a comic dramatist lacking neither vigour nor variety, and acquainted with Shakespearian[279] as well as Latin and Italian examples, chiefly devoted himself to the imitation of Latin, earlier French, and Dutch tragedy, the rhetorical dialogue of which he effectively reproduced in the Alexandrine metre.[280] Neither the turgid dramas of D. C. von Lohenstein (1665-1684), for whose _Cleopatra_ the honour of having been the first German tragedy has been claimed, nor even the much healthier comedies of Chr. Weise (1642-1708) were brought upon the stage; while the religious plays of J. Klay (1616-1656) are mere recitations connected with the Italian growth of the _oratorio_. The frigid allegories commemorative of contemporary events, with which the learned from time to time supplied the theatre, and the pastoral dramas with which the idyllic poets of Nuremberg--"the shepherds of the Pegnitz"--after the close of the war gratified the peaceful longings of their fellow-citizens, were alike mere scholastic efforts. These indeed continued in the universities and _gymnasia_ to keep alive the love of both dramatic composition and dramatic representation, and to encourage the theatrical taste which led so many students into the professional companies. But neither these dramatic exercises nor the _ludi Caesarei_ in which the Jesuits at Vienna revived the pomp and pageantry, and the mixture of classical and Christian symbolism, of the Italian Renaissance, had any influence upon the progress of the popular drama. The stage before its reform.