the catastrophe, and acting with surpassing effect in the interviews with Marinelli and with Galotti in the very striking fourth act. Count Appiani interests us during his brief career; Conti, the artist, is the mouthpiece of some pregnant æsthetic maxims; and the cut-throat dual, Ancelo and Firro, are a picturesque pair of villains, and by no means cyphers in the tragic sum-total. There is no flagging in the interest of this piece—no intervals of "dreary, dreary moorland, and barren, barren shore"—no sacrifice of action to disquisition—no postponement of objective life to subjective reverie. Germany witnessed, with edified surprise, a tragedy not all talk—a drama not all dreamy dulness—a play not all prosy parenthesis. Lessing taught Germany that it was possible to visit the theatre, and yet be wide awake; that it was even better to concentrate attention on the troubled life-history of a heroine like Emilia, than to slumber and drowsily ruminate the cud of their own sweet and bitter fancy. And verily he did yeoman's service in that "listless climate" and "land of drowsy-head," by infusing a new element into the national poppy-draught, to counteract in some degree its unqualified opiate, the effects of which tell on its constitution to this day.
In all the foregoing plays, Lessing had stuck to prose, and eschewed the "accomplishment of verse." This he had done on system. To curb the sway of false bombast and chilly pathos, hitherto paramount on the German stage, he indited his dramas in prose. Margaret Fuller tells us how Mr. Carlyle shocked her by declaiming at his dinner-table against writing in verse—how he mourned that Tennyson so wrote because the schoolmasters had taught him, and thus turned from the true path for a man—how he lamented that Burns had, in like manner, been turned from his vocation; and that Shakspeare had not the good sense to see thay it would have been much better to write straight on in prose.[1] Lessing, for a time, practically adhered to a similar anti-rhythmical theory, as a thing of temporary convenience, or, as we might say, καλον δια την ἐνεστωσαν ἀναγκην. But the play of his advancing age,[2] as he calls "Nathan the Wise," was written in verse. It is a didactic drama—its moral, the virtue of universal tolerance—its occasion, the fracas about the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. To those who are distressed by latitudinarianism in religious doctrine, it is necessarily displeasing on account of its substitution of spirit for dogma, goodness of heart for soundness of creed, cosmopolitism for nationalism, and humanity for sect. To those, again, who keep straitly to the old paths of critical orthodoxy, it is offensive, as being characterised by paucity of action and plethora of reflection, by the improbable air of the dialogue, and the inconsistent bearing of the actors. But a man's æsthetics and theology must both be a little "cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd," if he can see nothing to applaud in the picturesque grouping and benignant philanthrony of this notable drama. Its poetical merits are by no means splendid. Lessing's soul was not illuminated by the burning and shining
