Apparently they now had the essentials of poetry before them, but it had further to be taken into consideration that the marvelous may be barren and without human interest. This human interest which is indispensable must be moral, and would then obviously tend to the improvement of man; hence that poem would fulfil its ultimate aim which in addition to its merits possessed utility. It was the fulfilment of all these demands which constituted the test they wished to apply to the various kinds of poetry, and that species which imitated nature, and furthermore was marvelous, and at the same time moral in purpose and effect, they placed first and highest. And after much deliberation this great preëminence was finally ascribed, with the utmost conviction, to Æsop’s fables! Strange as such a deduction may now appear, it had the most decided influence on the best minds. That Gellert and subsequently Lichtwer devoted themselves to this department of literature, that even Lessing attempted to do work in it, that so many others applied their talents to it, speaks for the faith they put in this species of poetry. Theory and practice always act upon each other; one can see from men’s works what opinions they hold; and, from their opinions, it is possible to predict what they will do. Yet we must not dismiss our Swiss theory without doing it justice. Bodmer, with all the pains he took, remained in theory and practice a child all his life. Breitinger was an able, learned, sagacious man, who, after making a careful survey, recognized all the requirements to be fulfilled by a poem; in fact, it can be shown that he was dimly conscious of the deficiencies of his method. Noteworthy, for instance, is his query, whether a certain descriptive poem by König, on the _Review Camp of Augustus the Second_, is properly speaking a poem; and the answer to it displays good sense. But it may serve for his complete justification that, after starting on a wrong track and nearly completing his circle, he yet discovers the main issue, and at the end of his book, as a kind of supplement, feels it incumbent on him to urge the representation of manners, character, passions, in short the inner man--which surely constitutes the chief theme of poetry. It may well be imagined into what perplexity young minds were thrown by such maxims torn from their contexts, half-understood laws, and random dogmas. We clung to examples, and there, too, were no better off: the foreign as well as the classical ones were too remote from us; behind the best native ones always lurked a distinct individuality, the good points of which we could not arrogate to ourselves, and into the faults of which we could not but be afraid of falling. For any one conscious of productive power it was a desperate condition.