Yet there is one product of this long period which must count for something in virtue of its subject. It is the legend of Dr. Faustus, which was first printed in 1587, was utilized by Marlowe for his most celebrated play, gave the hint for Green’s _Friar Bacon_, and was revived by Goethe in his most famous and most influential work, the drama of _Faust_. It is reported that there actually was a person named Faust in Swabia in 1560, who rejoiced in a reputation for sorcery, and in the companionship of the devil. * * * * * With a long leap over an irrelevant and wearisome interspace we arrive at the “Classic Period” of German literature. It seems better to call this the “classic” than the “classical” period, since the former word signifies the best and golden age, the age of the classic works, not the age in which literature followed the rules and canons of classicism after the manner of the French in the “classical” period of Louis XIV, or of the English in the “classical” period after the days of Dryden. It is a superlative merit of the great German writers that they, like our Elizabethans, and like our poets of the early nineteenth century, for the most part refused to be fettered by artificial rules. Now was the time of a splendid crop of genius, a time when Frederick the Great had made North Germany more compact and peaceful, a time when princely patronage deigned to take note of literature. It was the time of a revolt against pedantry, of a reaction in favour of the national language, and of romantic and spontaneous literary creation. The period of creation had been preceded in the early eighteenth century by a period of criticism, in which the German Swiss school of Bodmer, affecting the literary freedom of England, came into collision with the Leipzig school of Gottsched, which favoured the regulated literature of France. The latter faction, however, soon passed away, and Klopstock’s _Messias_, inspired by Milton, though a work poor in action and character, showed how Germany was minded to abandon the mundane tone and interests which had satisfied the school of Voltaire and his Teutonic followers, and to adopt the cult of feeling and the ideal. For a time, it is true, the rising poet Wieland set himself in deliberate opposition to this cult, and proclaimed himself a pupil of the French; but, when settled at Weimar in 1772, his French predilections did not prevent him from at least devoting his abilities to the reconstruction of old romance.