But I must here, first of all, make honorable mention of one work, the most genuine production of the Seven Years’ War, and of perfect North-German nationality:  it is the first theatrical production caught from the important events of life, one of specific, temporary value, and one which therefore produced an incalculable effect,—­“Minna von Barnhelm.”  Lessing, who, in opposition to Klopstock and Gleim, was fond of casting off his personal dignity, because he was confident that he could at any moment grasp and take it up again, delighted in a dissipated life in taverns and the world, as he always needed a strong counterpoise to his powerfully laboring interior; and for this reason, also, he had joined the suite of Gen. Tauentzien.  One easily discovers how the above-mentioned piece was generated betwixt war and peace, hatred and affection.  It was this production which happily opened the view into a higher, more significant, world, from the literary and citizen world in which poetic art had hitherto moved.

The intense hatred in which the Prussians and Saxons stood towards each other during this war could not be removed by its termination.  The Saxon now first felt, with true bitterness, the wounds which the upstart Prussian had inflicted upon him.  Political peace could not immediately re-establish a peace between their dispositions.  But this was to be brought about symbolically by the above-mentioned drama.  The grace and amiability of the Saxon ladies conquer the worth, the dignity, and the stubbornness of the Prussians; and, in the principal as well as in the subordinate characters, a happy union of bizarre and contradictory elements is artistically represented.

If I have put my reader in some perplexity by these cursory and desultory remarks on German literature, I have succeeded in giving them a conception of that chaotic condition in which my poor brain found itself, when, in the conflict of two epochs so important for the literary fatherland, so much that was new crowded in upon me before I could come to terms with the old, so much that was old yet made me feel its right over me, when I believed I had already cause to venture on renouncing it altogether.  I will at present try to impart, as well as possible, the way I entered on to extricate myself from this difficulty, if only step by step.

The period of prolixity into which my youth had fallen, I had labored through with genuine industry, in company with so many worthy men.  The numerous quarto volumes of manuscript which I left behind with my father might serve for sufficient witnesses of this; and what a mass of essays, rough draughts, and half-executed designs, had, more from despondency than conviction, gone up in smoke!  Now, through conversation, through instruction in general, through so many conflicting opinions, but especially through my fellow-boarder Hofrath Pfeil, I learned to value more and more the importance of the subject-matter and the conciseness