Note 27 — Chapter II · THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.

1725-26. These eccentric and sometimes baroque titles were a mania with German men of letters. It had become epidemic in the fifteenth century, and continued so till the eighteenth, if not longer, the last very distinguished patient being, of course, Jean Paul. In this the feminine is an exaggeration of the Addisonian tendency to “fair-sex it,” as Swift says.