tive to the full. He would have seen a deep philosopher in the drunken sot, whose boast it was that he did more for the cause of temperance than all the lecturers; because he taught by example, and, reeling everywhere round the streets, gave men a chance to see with their own eyes what a beast drink made of man. Woe to the rancorous theological pamphlet which, in the name of the religion of peace, but added fuel to the flames of sectarian hate! Lessing would candidly admit its bitter spirit, but come to its defence with the maddening plea, that "the winning art of representing the yoke of religion as an easy yoke is so difficult, that not every theologian can possess it." To furious zealots contending for Churchunity he would cry out, "What gain! are two vicious dogs made good by being shut up in a single kennel?"" To disarm the scoffer by a life controlled by the spirit of religion is a work which most people are unwilling to undertake, because the Moravians have made it the principle of their conduct." What an exquisite non sequitur, and yet what a commentary on the logic of sectarian strife! Such vermin would seem small game for a Lessing, were it not that he uses them. as illustrations of broad principles, and finds them inciting cause to launch forth on a noble tide of justice, wisdom, and love. But he is quite as eager to join issue with Voltaire, Rousseau, or Diderot.

From the age of twenty-two to that of thirty-one, Lessing was mainly engaged with this work of purifying criticism. Still, with all this varied journalistic activity, he never loses sight of his deep, underlying purpose to fit himself, by careful training, for creative work,- for "doing the thing itself" as poet and dramatist, as well as showing how to do it as critic. He broke resolutely away at intervals from journalism, and spent the little money he had laid by in buying leisure to bury himself for months in study, and in opening up new vistas into wider realms. Literature as a trade he hated. The journalist's wont of living from hand to mouth, and cramming to meet the cry of the hour, was utterly odious. to him. While his mind was full, he would write with delight; yet at the first sign that the springs were getting low, he

would draw never another bucketful, but open up fresh communications with cloud and mountain and plain, and wait till the fountain was once more brimming. The ordinary plea of necessity for hack-work seemed never to weigh a feather with him. The necessity lay all on the other side. Never a man who had a profounder conviction that the "life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." To sit aloft where he could command a wide outlook, to feel his wings free to respond to every invitation to shady grove, or crystal stream, or far-off field gleaming in the sunshine, this was his lifelong, passionate love. He called himself "the bird upon the roof," and would consent to no cage, though its wires were of burnished gold. It stirs the blood of every reader of his life to feel the pulses of this Indian, Tartar, Arab love of freedom. He was full kith and kin, in this respect, with our own Concord Thoreau. It was such a noble freedom, too, he panted for, freedom to give himself, heart and soul, to such lofty ends. And with what unflinching heroism he paid the price!

About the age of thirty-one, Lessing grew utterly tired of his Berlin life. A disappointment, the severest he had ever yet encountered, had left him entirely unfitted for his ordinary work. He had entered into a most advantageous contract with a rich young man of Leipsic to journey with him, as his Mentor, over Europe, and spend years in studying the best that Belgium and Holland and France and Italy had to offer. Now, for the first time, he felt he could secure that broad foundation of thought and observation which would fit him to instruct his nation. He started forth on his travels in a mood of perfect exultation. But war broke out. The project must be abandoned. The rich young man was ruined. Lessing must seek change and renewal in other ways. The opportunity came before very long, in the shape of an invitation to him from one of Frederic's generals, Tauentzien, then military governor of Breslau, to become his assistant. It offered fair compensation, change of scene, intercourse with new phases of human life; and he gladly accepted it. Lessing's bookworm friends felt that he had committed literary

suicide. But he knew better. "I wish," he at this date entered in his diary, "to spin myself in for a time like an ugly worm, in order to come to light again a brilliant butterfly."

In Breslau, Lessing found what was far better for him than books and bookish men, - characters and events. His chief, Von Tauentzien, was himself a specimen of those burly forces, which, with locked horns and butting foreheads, were in those days pushing to crowd one another back, to run new lines for the map of Europe. The rough humor of his response to the Austrian general who had summoned him to surrender Breslau, with the threat that elsewise not even the child in the womb should be spared, "I am not pregnant, nor my soldiers either;" and the heroic oath he and his officers swore, and justified by doughty deeds, to die man by man sooner than give up the city, had already made his quality known. In daily intercourse with such a man, Lessing came in contact with that kind of mass and momentum of character which the energy of his own nature ever craved to encounter. As confidential adviser of one of Frederic's ablest generals, he was brought into intimate relations with a host of strong and active characters; he surveyed public affairs from a commanding height; he was admitted behind the scenes, and into the secret initiation of schemes that afterwards startled Europe; and "learned to know the relations of the world and of life on an incomparably grander scale than had been possible in his former literary career." Give a man with all this a seeing eye and a thoughtful brain, and a love of watching the varied play of life, and what can he ask better as one of his training fields for literary work? Nothing teaches like life. Of a somewhat similar experience, though immeasurably inferior in degree, even the ponderous Gibbon declares, that his own four months' drill in the county militia, in his youth, gave him more insight into the vast and complex military evolutions he unfolded in his "Decline and Fall," than all the books he had ever read.

Accordingly we find, that, with all his business and social engrossments, Lessing never studied harder, never created

more vigorously. To his residence in Breslau we owe these two noble productions, the play "Minna von Barnhelm," and "The Laocoon."

"Minna von Barnhelm" is one of those dramatic pieces which keep themselves young and attractive from generation. to generation, because they feed an enduring interest in human nature. It is a page out of life. Its characters are not personified qualities, but flesh-and-blood men and women. Even to this very day, Germany can boast no second comedy which so absolutely mirrors the national life. Its appearance constitutes an epoch in the literary history of the nation. It turned away attention from the old stock-subjects, traditional characters, and conventional rhetoric of the stage, and brought about a return to nature. It awakened a new consciousness of the infinitely rich and varied elements of pathos and fun and suffering and triumph and virtue and guilt, lying open in the common life all around us and within us. We learn more from it of how men thought and felt in the stern days of Frederic's wars than from volumes of ordinary histories. The tavern-keepers, the chambermaids, the officers' bodyservants, the sergeant, the colonel, old Fritz himself, the loves of high life and low, of parlor and kitchen, are brought in vivid distinctness before us. It is the next thing to being there ourselves. Nay, we are there to all real intents. We lay the play down with thankfulness that the life of one more period is henceforth a reality to us. Nor is this all. It has added another figure to that Pantheon of human nobilities through which every aspiring mind loves to wander. Major von Tellheim, the hero of the piece, we learn to know a man at once grand and of a distinctive cast of grandeur,no mere lay-figure, on which are draped certain moral or professional generalities, but the culminating product of the most characteristic forces of the time, working through a high-strung, responsive soul. He is a brave officer, on whom unjust suspicion has fallen. He has descended, step by step, into humiliating poverty, when the frank-hearted young Saxon woman Minna, to whom, in brighter days, he had been betrothed, discovers him. To her warm, generous soul, the

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whole sad history is ended in that hour. will marry; they will be, oh, how happy! stain rests on him. He will link the destiny of no gentle soul with his dishonored name. It is the old tragical story of the proud soul that would rather live in hell, its honor acknowledged, than be happy in heaven, the least breath sullying it. And yet the character is absolutely original. It is a pride that stands on no mere beggarly points of conventional honor. There is in the man such towering sense of grand integrity, such absolute identification of personal qualities with all that is worthiest of salvos of admiration, that to sully his name means to him to sully eternal right and truth. He asks no favor; only justice. The whole world ought to, shall, see him as he is. The king himself must acknowledge himself in the wrong. We may call such pride a weakness, if we will, a slavery, after all, to the vanity of human breath. But it rests on a self-confidence so supreme, on a wrath, that rectitude like his should be called in question, so righteously ablaze; its proportions are so grand, its trampling under foot the thought of home and happiness, and every form of joy, sooner than bring taint upon a gentle woman, is so heroic, that it affects us with the awe we feel in the presence of the bleak mountain and the desert ocean. There is such mass and power about it, that it becomes sublime. And we rejoice to feel, that, even in the dreary days of Frederic's wars, humanity took on such lordly shapes.

Lessing had nearly completed his "Laocoon," when he resolved to throw up his situation, and leave Breslau. He had spent nearly five years there; the war was over; henceforth the position meant but so much a year and routine work: he must be off for fresh scenes and pastures new. He left his post as poor as he had entered on it, with but one exception. He had made a large and choice collection of books. He might have acquired an ample fortune, as did his associates, in Breslau. He had known, before their public announcement, the various adulterations of the currency, to which Frederic from time to time was driven, and the various undertakings which would affect the value of stocks. He could have