"Dramaturgy" at Hamburg, recommended Shakespeare and other English
authors as models, but more particularly nature. The celebrated
Eckhof, the father of the German stage, who at first travelled about
with a company of actors and finally settled at Gotha, was the first
who followed this innovation. He was succeeded by Schroeder in
Hamburg, who was equally industrious as a poet, an actor, and a
Freemason. In Berlin, where Fleck had already paved the way, Iffland,
who, like Schroeder, was both a poet and an actor, founded a school,
which in every respect took nature as a guide, and which raised the
German stage to its well-merited celebrity.

At the close of the eighteenth century, men of education were seized
with an enthusiasm for art, which showed itself principally in a love
for the stage and in visits for the promotion of art to Italy. The
poet and the painter, alike dissatisfied with reality, sought to still
their secret longings for the beautiful amid the unreal creations of
fancy and the records of classical antiquity.

Fashion, that masker of nature, that creator of deformity, had, in
truth, arrived at an unparalleled pitch of ugliness. The German
costume, although sometimes extravagantly curious during the Middle
Ages, had nevertheless always retained a certain degree of picturesque
beauty, nor was it until the reign of Louis XIV. of France that dress
assumed an unnatural, inconvenient, and monstrous form. Enormous
allonge perukes and ruffles, the fontange (high headdress), hoops, and
high heels, rendered the human race a caricature of itself. In the
eighteenth century, powdered wigs of extraordinary shape, hairbags and
queues, frocks and frills, came into fashion for the men; powdered
headdresses an ell in height, diminutive waists, and patches for the
women. The deformity, unhealthiness, and absurdity of this mode of