Fully to understand Lessing's influence, and fully to understand the bearing of his works, some slight previous acquaintance with German literature is absolutely requisite. For unless we comprehend the source whence an author's inspirations have sprung, we may often misconceive his views. And Lessing's writings, above all, essentially sprang from the needs of his time. The subject is a large one, and can only be briefly indicated here; but we venture to remark, for those whose interest may be aroused in the subject of this volume, that the fuller their knowledge of the man and the motive force that evoked his works, the keener will be their enjoyment of these works themselves. In naming Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, we utter the three greatest names that German literature can boast. And between the three runs a connecting link of endeavour; the efforts of none can be conceived without the efforts of the others; but Lessing was the leader. He was the mental pathfinder who smoothed the way for Goethe's genius, and prepared the popular understanding for Schiller, the poetical interpreter of Kant. Lessing was born in the early years of the eighteenth century, at a time therefore when Germany may be said practically to have had no literature. For the revival of learning, the interest in letters that arose with the Reformation, and had been fostered by the emancipating spirit of Protestantism, had been blighted and extinguished by the terrible wars that ravaged the country for thirty years, impoverishing the people, destroying the homesteads and farms, and utterly annihilating the mental repose needful to the growth and to the just appreciation of literature. Books were destroyed as relentlessly in those sad times as flourishing cornfields were down-trodden by the iron heel of the invader. It was a fearful period of anarchy and retrogression, under the baneful effects of which Germany still labours. Peace was at last restored in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia, but it found the nation broken in spirit and vigour, and where material needs entirely absorb the mental energies of a people the Muses cannot flourish. And not only was the spirit of the people broken by the war, their national feeling seemed totally extinct. The bold fine language wherewith Luther had endowed them was neglected and despised by the better classes, who deemed servile imitation of the foreigner the true and only criterion of good taste. It grew, at last, to be held quite a distinction for a German to be unable to speak his own language correctly, and it seems probable that but for the religious utterances of the hymn-writers, who thus provided the poor oppressed people with ideal consolations, the very essence of the language, in all its purity, might have perished. It is among these hymn-writers that we must seek and shall find the finest, truest, and most national expressions of that time. Shortly before Lessing's birth