the second Silesian school, was a caricature of Opitz, Lohenstein of
Gryphius, Besser of Flemming, Talander and Ziegler of Zesen, and even
Francisci was outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel.
This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and
bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age.
The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naive
pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities
of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French
Alexandrine was also brought into vogue by this school, whose
immorality was carried to the highest pitch by Guenther, the lyric
poet, who, in the commencement of the eighteenth century, opposed
marriage, attempted the emancipation of the female sex, and, with
criminal geniality, recommended his follies and crimes, as highly
interesting, to the world. To him the poet, Schnabel, the author of an
admirable romance, the "Island of Felsenburg," the asylum, in another
hemisphere, of virtue, exiled from Europe, offers a noble contrast.

Three Catholic poets of extreme originality appear at the close of the
seventeenth century, Angelus Silesius (Scheffler of Breslau), who gave
to the world his devotional thoughts in German Alexandrines; Father
Abraham a Sancta Clara (Megerle of Swabia), a celebrated Viennese
preacher, who, with comical severity, wrote satires abounding with wit
and humorous observations; and Balde, who wrote some fine Latin poems
on God and nature. Praetorius, A.D. 1680, the first collector of the
popular legendary ballads concerning Ruebezahl and other spirits,
ghosts and witches, also deserves mention. The Silesian, Stranizki,
who, A.D. 1708, founded the Leopoldstadt theatre at Vienna, which
afterward became so celebrated, and gave to it the popular comic style
for which it is famous at the present day, was also a poet of extreme
originality. Gottsched appeared as the hero of Gallomania, which was