ons to confound a finicking dilettantism with the 'art to live'
are so strong, that it is worth while to correct the Rector's admiration
for Gray by looking on another picture--one of Gray's most famous
contemporaries, who in variety of interest and breadth of acquired
knowledge was certainly not inferior to him, but enormously his
superior. Lessing died when he was fifty-two (1729-1781); his life was
two years shorter than Gray's (1716-1771), and nearly twenty years
shorter than Pattison's (1813-1884). The Rector would have been the last
man to deny that the author of _Laokoeon_ and the _Wolfenbuettel
Fragments_ abounded in the discerning spirit and the power of
appreciation. Yet Lessing was one of the most incessantly productive
minds of his age. In art, in religion, in literature, in the drama, in
the whole field of criticism, he launched ideas of sovereign importance,
both for his own and following times, and, in _Nathan the Wise_, the
truest and best mind of the eighteenth century found its gravest and
noblest voice. Well might George Eliot at the Berlin theatre feel her
heart swelling and the tears coming into her eyes as she 'listened to
the noble words of dear Lessing, whose great spirit lives immortally in
this crowning work of his' (_Life_, i. 364). Yet so far were 'grasp and
mastery' from being incompatible with the exigencies of a struggle, that
the varied, supple, and splendid powers of Lessing were exercised from
first to last in an atmosphere of controversy. Instead of delicately
nursing the theoretic life in the luxury of the academic cloister, he
was forced to work like a slave upon the most uncongenial tasks for a
very modest share of daily bread. 'I only wished to have things like
other men,' he said in a phrase of pathetic simplicity, at the end of
his few short months of wedded happiness; 'I have had but sorry
success.' Harassed by small persecutions, beset by paltry debts, passing
months in loneliness and in indigence, he was yet so possessed, not
indeed by the winged daemon of poetic creation, but by the irrepressible
impulse and energy of production, that the power of his intellect
triumphed over every obstacle, and made him one of the greatest forces
in the wide history of European literature. Our whole heart goes out to
a man who thus, in spite alike of his own impetuous stumbles and the
blind buffets of unrelenting fate, yet persevered to the last in
laborious, honest, spontaneous, and almost ar