improvement. They are throughout written with dialectic
brilliancy, vigour, and lively wit, so that they are classics to this
day, although their immediate themes are long removed from our
interests From these 'Letters Concerning Contemporary Literature' our
modern science of criticism may be said to date. After this, works were
no longer merely judged by ancient standards, but by their application
to the demands of the age in which they were written.

The news of Kleist's death affected Lessing severely, and so broke down
his energies that he felt the imperative need of a change of scene. He
therefore accepted an offer to act as secretary to General Tauentzien,
who had been appointed Governor of Breslau. He followed him to that
city in 1760, hoping to find renewed energies in a fixed employment
that gave him good emolument and left him free time for self-culture.

Lessing remained at this post for nearly five years, until the
conclusion of the Seven Years' War, and though his letters of that
period are very scanty, and though he gained evil repute at Breslau as
a gambler and a tavern haunter, they were really the busiest and most
studious years of his life. Here he read Spinoza and the Church
Fathers, studied aesthetics and Winckelmann's newly issued 'History of
Art,' wrote his 'Minna von Barnhelm,' and the 'Laokoon.' Their
publication did not occur till his return to Berlin after the peace of
Hubertsburg, when Lessing threw up his appointment, greatly to the
dismay of his family, who had reckoned on it as a permanent resource.
But Lessing had had enough of soldiers and military life, he had
exhausted all they could teach him, and he craved to resume his
studious and independent existence. He did not like it on resumption so
well as he had thought he should at a distance. Restlessness seized
him. He wanted to travel; to see Italy. His friends desired an
appointment for him as royal librarian. He applied for the post, and
was kept for some time in uncertainty. He failed, however, owing to
Frederick's dislike to German learned men, and it was in vain that
Lessing's friends pleaded that he was anything but the typical German
pedant, uncouth, unkempt, who was Frederick's _bete noire_. To prove
his efficiency for the post, Lessing had published his 'Laokoon.' He
published it as a fragment, and, like too many of Lessing's works, it
never grew beyond that stage.

But _torso_ as it is, its influence has been far spreading. T