How miserably criticism then received such labors may be seen from the first volumes of “The Universal German Library.”  Of “The Comic Tales” there is honorable mention, but there is no trace of any insight into the character of the kind of poetry.  The reviewer, like every one at that time, had formed his taste by examples.  He never takes it into consideration, that, in a judgment of such parodistical works, one must first of all have before one’s eyes the original noble, beautiful object, in order to see whether the parodist has really gotten from it a weak and comical side, whether he has borrowed any thing from it, or, under the appearance of such an imitation, has perhaps given us an excellent invention of his own.  Of all this there is not a notion, but the poems are praised and blamed by passages.  The reviewer, as he himself confesses, has marked so much that pleased him, that he cannot quote it all in print.  When they even meet the highly meritorious translation of Shakespeare with the exclamation, “By rights, a man like Shakespeare should not have been translated at all!” it will be understood, without further remark, how infinitely “The Universal German Library” was behind-hand in matters of taste, and that young people, animated by true feeling, had to look about them for other guiding stars.

The material which, in this manner, more or less determined the form, the Germans sought everywhere.  They had handled few national subjects, or none at all.  Schlegel’s “Hermann” only showed the way.  The idyllic tendency extended itself without end.  The want of distinctive character with Gessner, with all his great gracefulness and child-like heartiness, made every one think that he could do something of the same kind.  Just in the same manner, out of the more generally human, some snatch those poems which should have portrayed a foreign nationality, as, for instance, the Jewish pastoral poems, those on the patriarchs altogether, and whatever else related to the Old Testament.  Bodmer’s “Noachide” was a perfect symbol of the watery deluge that swelled high around the German Parnassus, and which abated but slowly.  The leading-strings of Anacreon likewise allowed innumerable mediocre geniuses to reel about at large.  The precision of Horace compelled the Germans, though but slowly, to conform to him.  Comic heroic poems, mostly after the model of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” did not serve to bring in a better time.

I must here mention a delusion, which operated as seriously as it must be ridiculous when one examines it more closely.  The Germans had now sufficient historical knowledge of all the kinds of poetry in which the different nations had distinguished themselves.  This pigeon-hole work, which, properly speaking, totally destroys the inner conception of poetry, had been already pretty completely hammered together by Gottsched in his “Critical Art of Poetry;” and it had been shown at the same time that German poets,