there had awakened a sense of this national degradation, and some princes and nobles formed themselves into a society to suppress the fashionable Gallicisms and reinstate the people's language. Their efforts met with some little success, but their powers were too limited, and their attempts too artificial and jejune to exert any considerable influence either in the direction of conservation or of reform. It needed something stronger, bolder, to dispel the apathy of a century. Still these associations, known as the two Silesian schools, bore their part in sowing the good seed, and though most of it fell on stony ground, because there was little other ground for it whereon to fall, still some fell on fruitful earth, and brought forth in due season. An excessive interest in French literature was opposed by an equal interest in English literature. The adherents of these two factions formed what was known as the Swiss and Leipzig schools. They waged a fierce paper warfare, that had the good effect of once more attracting popular attention to the claims of letters, as well as showing the people that in French manners, French language, and French literature, the Alpha and Omega of culture need not of necessity be sought. The leader of the Leipzig faction, who stood by the French, was Gottsched, a German professor of high pretensions and small merits, who put his opponents on their mettle by his pedantic and arrogant attacks. He had instituted himself a national dictator of good taste, and for a long time it seemed probable that he and his party would triumph. His ultimate defeat was accomplished by Lessing, whose early boyhood was contemporaneous with the fiercest encounters of these antagonists. It was he who gave the death-blow to their factious disputes, and referred the nation back to itself and its own national glory and power. He found Germany without original literature, and, before his short life was ended, the splendid genius of Goethe shed its light over the land. Who and what was the man who effected so much?