the celebrated "Combat of the ancients and moderns," which also first
gave living writers sufficient courage to think of comparing modern
art with ancient.

Gottsched presented a program which he systematically strove to carry
out, and in which one of the most important places is given to the
building up of an artistic theatre, after the model of the great
civilized nations. He surely had as much right to show some
intolerance toward the harlequin and the popular stage as Lessing (who
supplanted him while continuing his work) had to indulge in a like
prejudice against the classical theatre of the French. Lessing,
however, as we have already seen, goes at the same time more deeply
into the matter by proposing not only a systematic but also an organic
construction of the separate _genres_, and Herder took the last step
when he demanded an autochthonous growth--that is to say, a
development of art out of the inner necessity of personalities on the
one hand, and of nationalities on the other. To be sure, the great
poets who now appeared were not included in the program, and Gottsched
did not appreciate Haller, nor did Lessing form a correct estimate of
Goethe, or Herder of Schiller. There is, however, a mysterious
connection between the aspirations of the nation and the appearance
of genius.

Klopstock probably felt most directly what was wanting in the
literature of his people, as he was also the most burning patriot of
all our classical writers; and at the same time, as is proved by the
_Republic of Letters_, his strange treatise on the art of poetry, he
was the one among them who bore the most resemblance to the literary
pedant of the old days. He is, therefore, continually occupied with
the comparison between German and foreign art, language, and