verted rules. He pointed out how the three unities insisted on
by the French had been often violated by them in the spirit if not in
the letter. He demonstrated the real meaning of Aristotle; and enabled,
by his exact classical knowledge, to place himself on the actual
stand-point of the ancients, he exposed the meretricious imitations of
the French, that had been too long passed off as genuine. He referred
the Germans to Shakespeare as a far truer follower of Sophocles than
Voltaire or Corneille, and he illustrated his conclusions by excerpts
and digressions remote from the subject presumed to be under treatment,
and which had first started this train of thought. Until now the French
had prescribed the sole standard of good taste. Lessing wished to
destroy this unthinking veneration, and lead his nation back to the
true sources of inspiration, and he fought with an iconoclastic zeal
against all distortions, and all confusions of aesthetic boundaries. In
a measure, indeed, the 'Dramaturgy' supplements the 'Laokoon', for in
the latter work Lessing had distinctly referred to the drama as the
highest expression of poetry, and he had placed poetry above the arts
of design in its results and capacities. Once more he displays his
subtlety in discriminating between the various constituents of the
complex feelings produced by art, and his rare faculty of combining
aesthetic sensibility with logical criticism constitutes one of his
grand claims to originality. The 'Dramaturgy' must be regarded rather
as a collection of [Greek: epea pteroenta], than a systematic book.
This remark applies, indeed, to all Lessing's prose writings.

The 'Dramaturgy' was not the only work that occupied Lessing at
Hamburg. A certain Professor Klotz had been for some time past
attacking Lessing's writings, and had done this in a spirit of arrogant
superiority that roused his ire. A remark that Lessing had been guilty
of "an unpardonable fault," in an archaeological matter, wherein Klotz
himself was plainly in error, brought matters to a crisis, and drew
down on Klotz a series of 'Letters treating of Antiquarian Subjects,'
that utterly demolished both the man and his conclusions. A private
feud gave occasion to this publication, but, like all that Lessing
wrote, it is full of matter of permanent worth. Cameos and engraved
gems form the ground-work of the controversy that was waged fast and
furiously for some months, until at last Lessing silenced his
ad