All good pictures accessible at Leipsic he made himself familiar with, and in 1767 he took a short holiday for the purpose of studying the picture gallery at Dresden. He stayed at the house of a worthy, humorous shoemaker, with whom he had much friendly talk. At the gallery the pictures of all the great schools interested him, but those of the Dutch school, from their fidelity to fact, appealed to him most strongly. Day after day he resumed his study of the masterpieces he loved, and so deeply did they influence his mind that, when he returned to the actual world, he could not help seeing things as if they formed part of a picture. His friend, the shoemaker, seemed to him like a figure that had stepped out of a canvas by Ostade. Powerfully as Goethe was fascinated by art, literature remained the real mistress of his affections. The Latin classics he read with growing pleasure, but he also constantly felt around him for new impressions and impulses, and by a kind of happy instinct he was led to the writers who were best fitted to nourish his genius. At Frankfort he had read Wieland’s translation of Shakespeare, and now Dodd’s “Beauties of Shakespeare” came in his way. His study of this selection did not yet disclose to him Shakespeare’s real significance, but it prepared him for deeper comprehension at a later stage. Wieland, having left far behind him the Pietistic fervour with which he began his career, was now tricking out in all sorts of forms, both of verse and prose, his easy Epicurean philosophy. Goethe read eagerly every one of his later writings; and, so far as style was concerned, he learned much from Wieland, who, with all his faults, knew how to present his ideas, such as they were, with lightness, delicacy, and grace. In 1766 Lessing’s “Laocoon” was published, and Goethe has described with what delight he and all the younger men of his day received this masterpiece of a great and serious spirit. As if by a flash of lightning, it revealed the broad lines of distinction that separate the arts from one another. It showed, too, that it is only by keeping strictly within its natural limits that each art can attain its highest objects, and that of all the arts poetry is necessarily the deepest, the most far-reaching, and the grandest. All this was new to Goethe, and spurred him to think out for himself the fundamental problems of critical thought. Not less enthusiastically did he welcome Lessing’s “Minna von Barnhelm,” which still remains the most exquisitely finished play of its kind in the German language. It impressed Goethe, because Lessing, unlike other German dramatists, had selected his motives directly from the life of his own time, but had conceived them with an imaginative force and subtlety that made them perennially interesting. In the spring of 1768 Lessing spent a month at Leipsic, but unfortunately Goethe did not see him. About the same time Goethe was shocked by the tidings of the murder of Winckelmann, for whom