As a poet, a critic, philosopher, or controversialist, his style will be found precisely such as we of England are accustomed to admire most: brief, nervous, vivid; yet quiet, without glitter or antithesis; idiomatic, pure without purism, transparent, yet full of character and reflex hues of meaning. ” Every sentence,” says Horn, and justly, ” is like a phalanx;” not a word wrong placed, not a word that could be spared; and it forms itself so calmly and lightly, and stands in its completeness, so gay, yet so impregnable ! As a poet he contemptuously denied himself all merit; but his readers have not taken him at his word: here loo a similar felicity of style attends him; his plays, his if Minna von Barnhelm,” his ” Emilie Gallotli,” his ” Nathan der Weise,” have a genuine and graceful poetic life; yet works known lo us in any language are purer from exaggeration, or any appearance of falsehood. They are pictures, we might say, painted not in colours, bill in crayons ; vel a strange attraction lies iu them ; for the figures are grouped into Ihe fines! attitudes, and true and spiritspeaking in every line, ll is with his style chiefly thai we have to do here; yet we must add, thai Ihe matter of his works is not less meritorious. His Criticism and philosophic or religious Scepticism were of a higher mood than had yet been heard in Europe, still more iu Germany: his ” Dramaturgic” first exploded the pretensions of Ihe French theatre, and, wilh irresistible conviction, made Shakspeare known lo his countrymen; preparing Ihe way for a brighter era in their literature, the chief men of which still thankfully look back to Lessing as Iheir patriarch. His ” Laocoon,” wilh its deep glances into the philosophy of Art, his ” Dialogues of Freemasons,” a work of far higher import than its title indicates, may yvl leach many things lo most of us, which we know not, and ought to know.Wilh Lessing and Ivlopstock might be joined in this respect nearly every one, we do not say of their distinguished, but even of their tolerated contemporaries. The two Jacobis, known more or less in all countries, are little know n here if they are accused of wanting literary taste.