Mendelssohn’s reply brought speedily, as it could scarcely fail to do, an ample and sincere apology from Lavater, a ‘retracting’ of the challenge, an earnest entreaty to forgive what had been ‘importunate and improper’ in the dedicator, and an expression of ‘sincerest respect’ and ‘tenderest affection’ for his correspondent. Mendelssohn’s was a nature to have more sympathy with the errors incidental to too much, than to too little zeal, and the apology was accepted as generously as it was offered. And here ended, so far as the principals were concerned, this somewhat unique specimen of a literary squabble. A crowd of lesser writers, unfortunately, hastened to make capital out of it; and a bewildering mist of nondescript and pedantic compositions soon darkened the literary firmament, obscuring and vulgarising the whole subject. They took ‘sides’ and gave ‘views’ of the controversy; but Mendelssohn answered none and read as few as possible of these publications. Still the strain and worry told on his sensitive and peace-loving nature, and he did not readily recover his old elasticity of temperament. In 1778 Lessing’s wife died, and his friend’s trouble touched deep chords both of sympathy and of memory in Mendelssohn. Yet more cruelly were they jarred when, two years later, Lessing himself followed, and an uninterrupted friendship of over thirty years was thus dissolved. Lessing and Mendelssohn had been to each other the sober realisation of the beautiful ideal embodied in the drama of _Nathan der Weise_. ‘What to you makes me seem Christian makes of you the Jew to me,’ each could most truly say to the other. They helped the world to see it too, and to recognise the Divine truth that ‘to be to the best thou knowest ever true is all the creed.’