simplicity, integrity, humanity, and piety, which lie at the foundation of all enduring literature. Kamenz, of course, was no Eden. It had its full infusion of narrow, fierce, oldLutheran dogmatism; but its dogmatism was of that up-anddown-right stamp which more enlightened men can at once smile at and respect, - smile at, because it is so exquisitely unconscious of any truth beyond its own horizon, and so implies no taint of cowardice or recreancy; respect, because it is so thorough-going and hot with honest love and hate.

Lessing's father was the deacon, and afterwards chief pastor, of the church in Kamenz. A fiery-hearted, brave, and consecrated man he was, a grand type of the old-fashioned Lutheran minister. It is plain to see he is of the sort of fathers that makes men of their boys, if the boys have any stuff in them to make men of. Heroic industry in study, an austere sense of right, contempt for wealth in comparison with knowledge, deep-rooted hatred of frivolity, these virtues constituted the warp and woof of his character, and were illustrated under conditions which proved them at the farthest remove from sentimentalities. "With almost incomprehen

sible abnegation of the common enjoyments of life which are within reach of even the poorest mechanic, he sacrificed himself for the education of his children; endured all privations with cheerfulness, all want with firmness, all weariness with joyful tranquillity; and, notwithstanding his own penury, never sent a poor man from his door without alms."

The mother of Lessing was of less marked individuality. A humble, devout woman, overweighted with bringing her twelve children into the world and rearing them through painful poverty; one whose whole life was a prolonged strain of meekly-borne toil, cheered only by the hope of struggling through to see her ten boys all grow up, study, and become pastors! Poor woman! all that her Gotthold did of great and glorious in the world brought never a smile to relieve the sadness of her heart. A pastor primarius stood to her on the pinnacle of human aspiration; and to see her first-born son, after all the weary abnegation his education cost, dwindle down and down to mere critic, poet, tragedy-composer, -not

so much as University Professor even, was to her a bitter

cup to drink. Many a stricken Scotch or New-England mother of fifty years ago knew all about her life-long sor

row.

As but the second child of a family of twelve, Lessing's boyhood escaped the pressure of the direful poverty which overtook the household farther on. Till the age of eight, he had a private tutor; and, at thirteen, the influence of a relative procured him a scholarship in the famous grammar-school at Meissen.

The school of St. Afra, at Meissen, was one of several which had been founded by an old Elector of Saxony, out of the proceeds of confiscated cloisters. Its righteous object was to make the funds enjoyed of yore by monks and nuns rear up a doughty race of Lutheran pastors, full-trained to confute the deadly heresies of the very Church whose money educated them, a carrying the war into Africa, after the highest old Scipionian manner. Take it for all in all, it was a good school for a boy like Lessing. Narrow and dry indeed it was in aim and method, a fit machine to turn out class on class in the accredited pedantic shape; but it was a place where solid, conscientious work was done. Lessing himself affirmed in after-years, that, "if any thoroughness and accuracy of scholarship had become his portion," he owed it to the discipline acquired at this time.

Latin stood first in the rank of studies. It was Latin, alas! considered not as the gate of introduction to the splendid eloquence of Cicero, or the flowing beauty of Virgil, or the genial worldly wisdom of Horace; but Latin as the pedant's paradise, the school-boy's drill-field, the theologian's outfit, the versifier's treasure-house of longs and shorts. A silly, childish conceit at the ability, purchased by due waste of years, to write more or less imperfect Latin prose and metre, was the normal product of the school. A noble enthusiasm for the manners and literature of a mighty nation was a fanaticism whose outbreak was duly depressed under heaps of smothering ashes.

It is fine to see the impetuous spirit of the boy Lessing

re-acting against these pitiful conceptions, and working itself out into the clear perception, that Latin was made for man, and not man for Latin, a heresy as monstrous at Meissen as ever of old in Judea the plea, that the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath. There was in the eager boy such a plus of physical and mental vigor; such superabundant life, craving to meet with and rejoice in like life elsewhere; such ever-present sense that the men and the nations on earth who have thought wisely and acted nobly are the one great thing in the world's history, and that the use of knowing their languages is to enter into glorious companionship of spirit with them, and receive ever-new access of being, that the young Samson burst contemptuously the pedantic withes which held the other boys so securely bound, and flung off adventurously after a nobler quest. He eagerly spent his spare time over Theophrastus and Plautus and Terence, writers whose theme is Man and Life, and wrote home to his mother that he had learned "self-knowledge" by reading comedies. His first essays at composition evince the same live spirit. He will have nothing to do with dead things. The phases of life through which he himself is passing, these are what he wants to write about. We see no

hunting after subjects. The subjects are hunting him, running him to his desk, demanding to work themselves out into the clear through him. He attempts a play of his own; and what does he choose for a theme? The death of Cæsar? The return of Regulus to Carthage? Not a bit of it. "The Young Scholar." And why? "A young scholar was the only species of fool with whom, at that time, it was not possible for me to be unacquainted. Grown up amongst such vermin, was it strange I directed my first weapons against them?" This is hitting the very bull's-eye. But better still even the words he wrote his mother about the effect of this self-same comedy upon himself: "I learned to know myself; and from that time I have certainly laughed at no one else more heartily." Here we have Lessing all over. As glad to have the truth hit him as hit any one else! Strike on, honest fellow, Truth; buffet the nonsense and pedantry out of me

and out of every one. It is rare fun to see the dust and shoddy fly from the old coat, even though one be inside, and the blows feel through.

Evidently such a boy would exhaust the possibilities of a school long before he had completed its ordinary terms. A year and three months ahead of the time when his course was up, we find him restless to get away. "He is a horse that must have double fodder; we cannot use him much longer," wrote the rector to his father. Accordingly his im- portunity prevailed over the tenacity of established order; and, at the age of seventeen, he was permitted to enter the University of Leipsic.

Among the theologians connected with the University, there was not one of sufficient breadth and freshness to awaken interest in a youth of the stamp of Lessing. Among the classical professors, however, there were two, Christ and Ernesti, whose genius and enthusiasm stirred him to the centre. They were creative men both, heralds of a new dawn of glow and beauty breaking in upon the long night of obscurest pedantry; men who studied the art and literature of Greece and Rome, to rejoice in the life that had expressed itself in the philosophy, poems, temples, sculpture, laws, customs, of the two foremost nations of antiquity; men who studied these things to become more men themselves, and with a view to æsthetic culture and individual power of creation. In Christ, in particular, Lessing for the first time saw a rounded man, - no awkward book-worm, ignorant of the world, but one who had travelled widely, had acquired the bearing of a man of the world, and had learned to subordinate all study to purposes of life. Nor was the influence of Leipsic itself "a whole world in miniature" to his unwonted eyes -less stimulating and amazing. Its aristocratic polish; its solid, burgher comfort; its literati, its vast book-trade, its journalism; above all, its theatre, these, to the fresh, unhackneyed youth, opened up endless opportunities for culture and delight. At once, with clear-eyed outlook, he sets to work to adjust himself to his new position. His massive common-sense at once asserts itself, as all through life with

him:

"I left my study, and ventured out amongst my fellows. Great heavens! What a contrast between myself and them did I discover! A boorish bashfulness of manner, an ungainly clownishness of body, an utter ignorance of social customs, these were the fine qualities which distinguished me. I read contempt in the demeanor and looks of my companions. I resolved, at whatever cost, to improve myself. I learned dancing, fencing, riding. I made such progress in these exercises, that even those who at first had wished to deny me all dexterity were compelled to admire me. My body became somewhat more graceful, and I sought society in order to learn life. I realized that books might make me learned, but would never make me a man.”

The centre of intensest interest, however, lay to Lessing in the Leipsic Theatre. He would sooner have eaten dry bread than have missed the play. He translated and corrected for the actors to gain the needed tickets. He frequented the representations, not for amusement, but for serious ends of study. The impulse to dramatic creation was already strong within him. Here was the Theatre as it was: he must understand it thoroughly. Every activity with him developed itself in connection with some real existence. He yoked himself ever to the present. Evolution, and not revolution, was the law he read as ruling all progression. The merits and the demerits of the plays themselves, the weakness and the strength of the actors, the tone and temper of the audience, these he must learn to feel and comprehend through and through in the school of practical experience. He seemed to understand from the outset why it has held true in every age, that all great dramatic literature, the Greek, the Spanish, the English, grew out of a living stage, and learned its laws by the proof of trial. He felt that just as surely as war alone can breed soldiers, and stormy seas sailors, and public affairs statesmen, so the only school of the dramatist lay in the doing the thing itself, in the production of the drama face to face with the eyes and ears, the shouts, hisses, tears, hushed and expectant silence, of a sea of human beings.

This reverence for the infinite richness and tutelage of life itself, of the great restless, million-sided, marvellous world in which men live, is the grand peculiarity which makes