Professor Gottsched triumphed for a long time over Bodmer and his party,
till at last public opinion became too strong, and the dictator died the
laughing-stock of Germany. It was in the very thick of this literary
struggle that the great heroes of German poetry grew up,--Klopstock,
Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. Goethe, who knew both
Gottsched and Bodmer, has described that period of fermentation and
transition in which his own mind was formed, and his extracts may be read
as a commentary on the poetical productions of the first half of the
eighteenth century. He does justice to Guenther, and more than justice to
Liscow. He shows the influence which men like Brockes, Hagedorn, and
Haller exercised in making poetry respectable. He points out the new
national life which, like an electric spark, flew through the whole
country when Frederick the Great said, "_J'ai jete le bonnet pardessus les
moulins_;" and defied, like a man, the political popery of Austria. The
estimate which Goethe forms of the poets of the time, of Gleim and Uz, of
Gessner and Rabener, and more especially of Klopstock, Lessing, and
Wieland, should be read in the original, as likewise Herder's "Rhapsody on
Shakspeare." The latter contains the key to many of the secrets of that
new period of literature, which was inaugurated by Goethe himself and by
those who like him could dare to be classical by being true to nature and
to themselves.

My object in taking this rapid survey of German literature has been to
show that the extracts which I have collected in my "German Classics" have
not been chosen at random, and that, if properly used, they can be read as
a running commentary on the political and social history of Germany. The
history of literature is but an applied history of civilization. As in the
history of civilization we watch the play of the three constituent classes
of society,--clergy, nobility, and commoners,--we can see, in the history of
literature, how that class which is supreme politically shows for the time
being its supremacy in the literary productions of the age, and impresses
its mark on the works of poets and philosophers.

Speaking very generally, we might say that, during the first period of
German history, the really moving, civilizing, and ruling class was the
clergy; and in the whole of German literature, nearly to the time of the
Crusades, the clerical element predominates. The second period is marked
by the Cru