Note 33 — Chapter II · THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.

V. sup., ii. 554. As an example of Gottsched in his less sad but more furious mood, nothing can be better than the passage quoted by Herr Braitmaier (op. cit., p. 139) from the Beiträge (xxix. 8). After much vituperation of Shakespeare (Julius Cæsar had just been translated) and other English playwrights, even Addison, he winds up: “That the English stage helps in such a shameless fashion to nourish the two principal vices of the English people—cruelty and lust—is something so horrible that all honour-loving Englishmen must blush as often as they think of their theatre. There is scarcely a comedy wherein blood and murder do not come in just as if it were a tragedy, and wherein both sexes do not openly, and with the most revolting expressions, speak of things that can only occur in disreputable and forbidden houses.” Poor Gottsched!