And when Kotzebue published the comedy, _Der hyperboräische Esel_, which satirises Friedrich and his book, August Wilhelm responded with the witty satire, _Ehrenpforte für den Präsidenten von Kotzebue_; but privately he called the book a "foolish rhapsody." Tieck called it "eine wunderliche Chimäre," and even Schleiermacher attempted to disavow his authorship of the _Letters on the Subject of Lucinde_, after his inclination to a species of sensual mysticism had given place to a Protestant-rationalistic tendency. Nevertheless, or rather, for this very reason, it is of importance that we should inquire into the nature of these letters, which were written with the aim of proving _Lucinde_ to be, not merely an innocent, but a good and holy book, the worth of which is testified to by the delight which high-minded women take in it. On the letters of two such women, his sister, Ernestine, and his friend, Eleonore Grunow, Schleiermacher's own are based. There is little of general interest for us nowadays in these letters, so we shall only notice their salient points. As _Lucinde_ is the solitary contribution of Romanticism towards the solution of a social problem, and as marriage is almost the only social question grappled with by literature generally at the beginning of the century (Goethe's _Wanderjahre_ alone, in the manner of Rousseau's romances, occupying itself with a wider range of such questions), it will be of interest to compare the utterances of the different European literatures on this subject. Schleiermacher's book is an attack upon prudery. At the very beginning he writes: "I was almost inclined to believe that you had become a prude; if you had, I should have entreated you to go and settle in England, to which country I should like to banish the whole genus." And one division of the book is entirely devoted to an analysis of that false modesty which precludes true modesty, and causes so much unnecessary misery. "The anxious and narrow-minded modesty by which society at the present day is characterised, has its root in the consciousness of a great and general wrongheadedness and depravity. But where is it to end? It is bound to spread farther and farther. If people are perpetually on the lookout for what is immodest, they will end by discovering it in every domain of thought, and all conversation and social intercourse must cease.... utter depravation and the perfect education by which man returns to innocence, both do away with modesty; in the first case true modesty, as well as false, is destroyed; in the second, it ceases to be a thing to which much attention is paid or much importance attached.[2]