Note 73 — Chapter II · THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.

To illustrate this before going further, we may take account both of the Theatrical Miscellanies, which fill vols. vii. and viii. of the Works, and of the similar miscellanies of a more general kind contained in vol. xiv. The latter include many short reviews and notes of the kind elsewhere noticed: the former supply by far the most remarkable instance of that extraordinary industry—that mania, so to speak, for assimilating all the material furnished by older and more accomplished literatures—which is the great note of this period of German culture. Much, as was almost necessary, is mere abstract, such as in vol. 7 the above-noticed analysis of Crisp’s Virginia and the long article on the Tragedies of Seneca, where, however, there is not a little actual criticism of Brumoy, &c. The Lives of Thomson (“Jacob” Thomson) and of Destouches show us by contrast what a great thing Dr Johnson did in elaborating the biographical-critical causerie: and even the Dissertations on tragédie larmoyante give little more than a frame of Lessing’s, the painters being Chassiron and Gellert. One article in vol. 8, “Von Johann Dryden,” might have been of the very highest critical interest; but it is a mere fragment. And the “Outlines of a History of the English Stage,” though showing Lessing’s astonishing scholarship in his favourite subject, are only outlines.