By chance a copy of Addison's Spectator fell into his hands. He turned at once from French and Italian culture to admire English classics. The first German to appreciate Milton and Shakespeare (the latter he called the English Sophocles), he never wavered in his devotion to the English school. With his faithful friend, Johann Jakob Breitinger, a conscientious scholar, he started in Zürich a critical weekly paper on the plan of the Spectator. It was called Discoursen der Mahlern (Discourses of the Painters), and its essays embody the first literary effort of the Swiss as a nation. A little weekly coterie soon gathered about Bodmer to discuss the conduct of the paper; but much of the spirit and enthusiasm of these councils evaporated in print, the journal being subjected to a rigid censorship. Not alone art and literature came under discussion, but social subjects. All contributions were signed with the names of famous painters, and dealt with mistakes in education, the evils of card-playing, the duties of friendship, love and matrimony, logic, morality, pedantry, imagination, self-consciousness, and the fear of death. These discourses were chiefly written by Bodmer and his colleague Breitinger. The earlier papers, awkwardly expressed, often in Swiss dialect, masqueraded as the work of Holbein, Dürer, Raphael, or Michael Angelo. Although intended at first for Swiss readers only, the little weekly soon captured a German public. Its purpose was to kindle the imagination, and to suggest a parallel between the art of painting and the art of literature. Bodmer only dimly outlined what an infinitely greater mind defined with unerring precision some twenty years later in the 'Laocoon.' But the service of the older man to literature is not therefore to be undervalued. Bodmer created the function of analytic and psychological criticism in Germany. Hitherto no writer had been called to account for any literary offense whatever. Bodmer maintained that the man who demanded a hearing from the public must show good cause for this demand.