Albrecht von Haller was almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of German-language Swiss literature in the eighteenth century. Together with the Zurich critics Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, he ensured that Switzerland, which had played only a minor part in German literary and intellectual life since the Reformation, would have an important--indeed, vital--role in the German Enlightenment and in the rapid emergence of German literature as the most adventurous and original literature in late-eighteenth-century Europe. By the time Haller died, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had completed his critical masterpieces Laokoon (1766; translated 1836) and Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767, 1769; translated as Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1962), Johann Gottfried Herder had edited the collection of essays Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (On the German National Character and German Art, 1773), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had written his Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; translated as The Sorrows of Werther , 1779). But Haller was Goethe's senior by forty years...