The 'Dramaturgy' is the permanent result of this shipwrecked undertaking, itself a fragment--for after a while Lessing wearied of it, and piratical reprints robbed him of the slender profit--but a fragment like the 'Laokoon,' full of suggestive truths and flashes of elucidation. As an entire work it is not as homogeneous in design as the 'Laokoon'; no connected or definite thread of reasoning pervades it, its perusal requires more independent thought from the reader, who must form his own conclusions, they are not worked out before him as in the 'Laokoon.' But in its ultimate results it is no less valuable, and has been no less effective. It freed the German stage from bondage to French pseudo-classicisms by its scornful exposure of the perversions practised by the Gallic authors under the cloak of Aristotelian laws. Lessing showed the divergence between real and absolute, and fanciful and perverted rules. He pointed out how the three unities insisted on by the French had been often violated by them in the spirit if not in the letter. He demonstrated the real meaning of Aristotle; and enabled, by his exact classical knowledge, to place himself on the actual stand-point of the ancients, he exposed the meretricious imitations of the French, that had been too long passed off as genuine. He referred the Germans to Shakespeare as a far truer follower of Sophocles than Voltaire or Corneille, and he illustrated his conclusions by excerpts and digressions remote from the subject presumed to be under treatment, and which had first started this train of thought. Until now the French had prescribed the sole standard of good taste. Lessing wished to destroy this unthinking veneration, and lead his nation back to the true sources of inspiration, and he fought with an iconoclastic zeal against all distortions, and all confusions of æsthetic boundaries. In a measure, indeed, the 'Dramaturgy' supplements the 'Laokoon', for in the latter work Lessing had distinctly referred to the drama as the highest expression of poetry, and he had placed poetry above the arts of design in its results and capacities. Once more he displays his subtlety in discriminating between the various constituents of the complex feelings produced by art, and his rare faculty of combining æsthetic sensibility with logical criticism constitutes one of his grand claims to originality. The 'Dramaturgy' must be regarded rather as a collection of [Greek: epea pteroenta], than a systematic book. This remark applies, indeed, to all Lessing's prose writings.