Lessing stand out in such striking contrast with the large proportion of his nation's leading men. He was a realist in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. Never a momentary disposition did he evince to retire into the depth of his consciousness to evolve the absolute idea of the camel. He took the hump-backed, knock-kneed, snow-shoed creature of the desert as he found him, in profound faith that the desert itself, with its shifting sands and stunted herbage and springless wastes, knew how to bring to bear a thousandfold more cunning and persistent energies to turn out just the gaunt, long-suffering servant needed, than ever your philosopher, be the depths of his inner consciousness of the profoundest. The race-course to create racers; the fox-chase to create daring riders, bottom in horses, keen scent in hounds; the rivalries of yachtsmen to create flowing lines, and right-trimmed sails, and hardy handling in a heavy blow, this was his philosophy. And this is the more remarkable when we reflect on Lessing's ceaseless quest after absolute perfection, after immutable laws of truth and beauty. These were the passion of his heart. But he knew that to reach them one must respect the conditions of their growth. They were to be studied in their richest earthly incarnations, not in vague and baseless theories. They were to be sought in the works of those whom they themselves had chosen, through personal endowments, and rare opportunities, and richest inheritance of slowly-ripened results, to reveal their fulness. They had descended to earth, and taken up their abode in the Parthenon at Athens, in the sculpture of Phidias, in the Iliad of Homer, in Eschylus and Sophocles and Shakespeare. There meet them; there study the shaping forces that made these men organs of truth and beauty; there learn to open the soul to the teachings of life, as these men did; there learn to believe, that you too live in the same rich world with them, and that the same elemental powers are at hand to mould and inspire you according to the measure of your capacity. If Lessing's life teaches any lesson nobly, it is the lesson of measureless scorn for the puling sentimentalism which affects to look on life and its providential teaching as too poor a barren to move to love and wonder, of the selfcentered vanity which assumes to be able to live on its own meagre personal resources, and to need no help outside it self. Thus absorbed in a bright world of thought and emotion, time passed swiftly and profitably with the young Leipsic student. Alas! he was soon to be made cruelly aware, that there were other worlds of life whose existence he had lost sight of. Dame Rumor had flown abroad. She had alighted in the old parsonage, and gasped out her breathless story. Shrieks had greeted the dread recital. Their Gotthold! their Gotthold! was living in the vile society of comedians, people too vile to have the right of Christian burial! His intimate friends were free-thinkers! He had written a play, and was to personate one of the characters in it on the public stage himself! There was wailing in every chamber, from the outraged father, the broken-hearted mother, the eleven children, the smallest even old enough to catch the feeling that Gotthold had done something dreadful. Here was the wreck of every hope. He that was to become pastor primarius himself, and help to make pastores primarios of the ten other boys, was worse than dead. He must be plucked from the pit at any cost. "Disobedience is learned in bad company he will not obey an order home," cries the distracted mother. "God forgive us! we must resort to a lie; nothing else will do," responds the father. "Your mother is dangerously ill, and longs to speak with you before her death," writes the hard-pressed pastor, as fair a case for the recording angel's blotting tear as Uncle Toby's oath; and off posts at once the true-hearted son, without stopping even for needful clothing, through the cold and storms of winter. - Lessing's visit to the old home in Kamenz produced a somewhat better state of feeling, though it could not bridge the gulf that had opened up between the family and himself. He did what he could to reconcile their minds to the change that had come upon him. The father saw that the son had preserved an unblemished purity of morals, and had made great growth in knowledge: the mother was somewhat con soled by a sermon he wrote for her, to show her he could compose one at any time. He agreed to take up the study of medicine, and also devote much time to philology, that he might become qualified for a professorship, should opportunity offer. But it was little after all he could do to heal their cruel disappointment. They worked their work; he must work his. And so he left them, and returned to Leipsic. His stay there, however, was short. Leipsic was over and through for him. He had exhausted university life; the theatrical troupe had been broken up; and, worse than all, he had stood security for several actors who had decamped, leaving him to bear the brunt, and was in debt. Something must be done. He had no taste for professional life in any form, so he resolved on authorship. We find him, accordingly, shortly after in Berlin, his communications destroyed with all the established bread-and-butter vocations of college-trained men, a Bohemian, if you choose to call him so. A Bohemian, assuredly, in one of the badges of the tribe, his poverty. "No money, no recommendations, no influ ential friends, no other weapons for his battle than his cheerful courage, his confidence in his own powers, and the discipline acquired through past privations!" An old friend and fellow-student, Mylius, shares his garret with him. His clothes are so shabby, that he cannot present himself to ask employment with any hope of success. A sad outlook, apparently. But we need waste no superfluous pity over threadbare clothing, when we see in it, or mayhap through it, a young man buoyed up with such hope and faith as Lessing knew. Forthwith we find him projecting and commencing, in association with Mylius, a quarterly review, entitled "Contributions to the History and Reform of the Theatre." It was to include, besides a philosophical criticism of the dramatic literature of all nations and ages, instruction on all matters pertaining to histrionic art, together with translations of the best Greek, Latin, English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Dutch plays. Such was the glorious hope that cheered the breast of a threadbare youth of twenty, in his garret. The scope and boldness of the inception are illus VOL. LXXXII. -NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. II. 15 trative of the hardihood of Lessing's mind. And yet the abandonment of the enterprise, after the issue of the first few numbers, brings before us, in quite as marked a way, the lofty conscientiousness of the man. His collaborator, Mylius, had affirmed in one of the numbers that there was no Italian drama. No Italian drama? Here was the whole undertaking disgraced at the outset by an exhibition of the grossest ignorance. "If you are not better acquainted with the stage among other foreign nations than with that of the Italians, we have pretty things to expect from you," Lessing seemed to hear uttered in disgust by every competent judge. He would go no step farther in such association. His whole nature revolted from every form of pretence and assumption. No earnest Luther ever looked with hotter-burning abhorrence on greedy, foul-minded monk or pardon-vender, daring to speak to the people in the name of God and holiness, than Lessing on shallow, pretentious, oracular ignorance, sacrilegiously leaping upon the throne of instruction, and tampering with the eternal laws of truth and beauty. To him, these laws of truth and beauty were matters of unspeakable moment. In their cause he would willingly endure poverty, wearing toil, the hate of cliques and parties. Absolute veracity, as the foundation-stone of the teacher's character, was the god he worshipped on bended knees. And, all through life, he broke away from the contamination of every kind of literary association with ignorance and pretence, with as chaste and wounded a horror as Hebrew Joseph from the hateful arms of the wife of Potiphar, even though in his flight he must leave behind him his only garment. Henceforth he would work alone. For a year or more we find our friend earning his daily bread by such job-work as he could compass; yet finding time to push, with iron diligence, his own peculiar studies. He is beginning to make a name; and, at the age of twenty-two, we see him called to the editorship of a literary sheet, the "Berlin Journal." The courage, originality, and fertility of his mind shone forth at once. While duly noticing the ordinary literature of the day, he shows his innate temper by grappling at once with the giants of the world of letters, the giants alike by bulk of thews and sinews, and the giants by courtesy of their dwarf surroundings. Two great parties then divided in bitter feud the German literary world, the followers of Klopstock and the followers of Gottsched; the party of vague, tumultuous license, and the party of narrow, pedantic rules. "Genius scorns rules," shrieked the one. "Genius is made by rules," shrieked the other. Lessing sides with neither party. Penetrating at once to the cause of the confused and bitter strife, he lays down the reconciling truth. There are eternal laws. Genius in its grandest flights is ever sublimely orderly; but genius takes its laws from no dry, digested code. Genius is vision; and each fresh creative mind sees farther into the eternal realms, and legislates anew: "What charms this soul, all souls must charm; what grieves it, saddens all: This principle established, he lashes, with pitiless wit, alike the pedantic conceit of those who would stretch out a Shakespeare or a Molière on the Procrustes' bed of a Sophocles or an Aristophanes, and proceed to hack off every protruding member, indifferent alike whether it be winged-foot, or cunning hand, or majestic head, so only an accurate fit be made,lashes alike this fool's proceeding, and the crude, uncultured ignorance which would hail with rapture every utterance of muddy, bombastic feeling, as glorious enfranchisement from the tyranny of law. All the great qualities of the later acknowledged man appear in these youthful essays. From the first, his analysis is exhaustive, his wit brilliant, his art of presentation masterly, his style alternately trenchant, sportive, fascinating, annihilating. What a revelation, this last, to a nation with whom dulness and depth, attractiveness and emptiness, were regarded as one flesh, the ban of God on all who should dare to put them asunder! Under Lessing's hand the driest work receives a notice all ablaze with wit and wisdom. Stupidity inspired his faculties as readily as genius, and was as instruc |