Poets and critics now rose in every quarter and pitilessly assailed
Gottsched, the champion of Gallomania. They were themselves divided
into two opposite parties, into Anglomanists and Graecomanists,
according to their predilection for modern English literature or for
that of ancient Greece and Rome. England, grounded, as upon a rock, on
her self-gained constitution, produced men of the rarest genius in all
the higher walks of science and literature, and her philosophers,
naturalists, historians, and poets exercised the happiest influence
over their Teutonic brethren, who sought to regain from them the vigor
of which they had been deprived by France. The power and national
learning of Germany break forth in Klopstock, whose genius vainly
sought a natural garb and was compelled to assume a borrowed form. He
consecrated his muse to the service of religion, but, in so doing,
imitated the Homeric hexameters of Milton; he sought to arouse the
national pride of his countrymen by recalling the deeds of Hermann
(Armin) and termed himself a bard, but, in the Horatian metre of his
songs, imitated Ossian, the old Scottish bard, and was consequently
labored and affected in his style. Others took the lesser English
poets for their model, as, for instance, Kleist, who fell at
Kunersdorf, copied Thomson in his "Spring"; Zachariae, Pope, in his
satirical pieces; Hermes, in "The Travels of Sophia," the humorous
romances of Richardson; Mueller von Itzehoe, in his "Siegfried von
Lindenberg," the comic descriptions of Smollett. The influence of the
celebrated English poets, Shakespeare, Swift, and Sterne, on the tone
of German humor and satire, was still greater. Swift's first imitator,
Liscow, displayed considerable talent, and Rabener, a great part of
whose manuscripts was burned during the siege of Dresden in the seven
years' war, wrote witty, and at the same time instructive, satires on
the manners of his age. Both were surpassed by Lichtenberg, the little
hump-backed philosopher of Goettingen, whose compositions are replete