by Goethe, though he must have
written or assisted in writing several others. With his usual
causticity Herder characterised the manner of the two chief
contributors. "You," he tells Merck, "are always Socrates-Addison; and
Goethe is for the most part a young, arrogant lord, with horribly
scraping cock's heels, and, if I come among you some day, I shall be
the Irish Dean with his whip." Goethe himself, reviewing these early
efforts in the light of his maturity, is sufficiently modest regarding
their intrinsic merit. He had then, he says, neither the knowledge nor
the discipline requisite for adequate criticism. On the other hand, he
claims to have given evidence in his notices of books of a gift, which
no reader of them can fail to perceive--the gift of instinctive
insight into the essentials of the subject in hand. In the business of
reviewing, however, he seems to have taken little pleasure. "The day
has begun festively," he wrote to Kestner on Christmas, 1772, "but,
unfortunately, I must spoil the beautiful hours with reviewing; but I
do so with good heart, as it is for the last issue."[134]

[Footnote 134: Goethe wrote the epilogue to the last number of the
Review, of which he says to Kestner, "hat ich das Publikum und den
Verleger turlipinirt."]

To the same year, 1772, belong two short productions of Goethe which
deserve a passing notice as exhibiting his strange blending of
interests at this period. The one is entitled _Brief des Pastors zu
... an den neuen Pastor zu ..._, and professes to have been translated
from the French. The Letter is another illustration of his interest in
religion and in the interpretation of the Bible which had begun with
his early reading of the Old Testament, and which his intercourse with
the Fraeulein von Klettenberg and Herder had intermittently kept alive.
The theological teaching of the Letter is, in point of fact, a
compound of the teaching of these two. Its main object is to emphasise
the necessity of toleration in the interest of religion itself, and
nowhere was the monition more needed than in Frankfort, where the
antipathy between those of the Reformed and the Lutheran communions
was such as even to debar intermarriage. Rationalism and dogmatism are
equally reprobated, and the sum of all true religion is found to
consist in the love of God and of our neighbour. The strain of
mystical piety which runs through the whole production doubtless
proceeds from imaginative sympathy