The attack on the old formalism and its rules, in favour of free and untrammelled genius, was deliberate and organized. It consisted on the one hand of the fresh and searching criticism of Lessing and Herder, and, on the other, of the efforts of German poetic youth. The name given to the young spirits of the literary revolt and regeneration, the clamourers for free play of spontaneity and imagination, was that of _Stürmer und Dränger_. They were so called from the words _Sturm und Drang_, often translated “Storm and Stress,” but in reality meaning “Vigorous Assault,” which formed the title of a drama published by a certain Klinger in 1774, although their appropriateness is not now easy to discern. This particular drama supplied, however, in its wild and extravagant structure, imagery and figures, a kind of manifesto of the new school. Those who sided with the movement were therefore called the “Storm-and-Stress men,” just as the “Impressionists” in painting have been so named from the picture called _Impressions_, in which Monet first publicly exemplified their methods. Most of the poets who were afterwards to become famous belonged in their youth to this new school, went through its extravagances, and came out all the better for it in their maturity. Goethe with his juvenile drama of _Götz_, Schiller with his of _The Robbers_, had their “Sturm und Drang” stage, the stage when they allowed their imaginations and their language to run riot in wild extravagance. The first great writer of the classic period in point of date is Lessing. He had nothing to do with the violent ardours of “Sturm und Drang.” None the less he is a regenerator, a more powerful regenerator, and, in a sense, the founder of German literature. His dramas, with their central idea of depicting a hero whose character and conduct point a general moral, fixed the manner of German drama for Goethe and Schiller, and therefore for all German literature. His _Minna von Barnhelm_, and his _Nathan the Wise_, are moral lessons in military duty, or in religious toleration. They are the precursors and direct progenitors of Goethe’s _Faust_ and Schiller’s _Wallenstein_. But, perhaps, of all Lessing’s works that which is best known abroad, and which has been most powerful and far-reaching in its influence, is his _Laocoon_. Despite its errors and shortcomings, this famous treatise on the “Boundaries of Poetry and Painting,” a work of criticism in the philosophy of the beautiful, has perhaps influenced more minds than any other work on aesthetics ever written except those of Aristotle and Longinus. To countless others besides Macaulay it has been their first illumination of the everlasting principles of beauty.