revival in letters and art was carried out with a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and Catholicism.  Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, it was more critical, learned, and conscious of its own purposes and methods than the kindred movement in England.  The English mind, in the act of creation, works practically and instinctively.  It seldom seeks to bring questions of taste or art under the domain of scientific laws.  During the classical period it had accepted its standards of taste from France, and when it broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and gave either no reasons, or very superficial ones, for its new departure.  The elegant dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; or beside thorough-going Abhandlungen like the “Laocooen,” the “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” Schiller’s treatise “Ueber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung,” or the analysis of Hamlet’s character in “Wilhelm Meister.”  There was no criticism of this kind in England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, in particular, to compare with the papers on that subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg, Lenz, Goethe, and many other Germans.  The only eighteenth-century Englishman who would have been capable of such was Gray.  He had the requisite taste and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic breadth and depth for a fundamental and eingehend treatment of underlying principles.

Yet even in this critical department, German literary historians credit England with the initiative.  Hettner[15] mentions three English critics, in particular, as predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in popular poetry.  These were Edward Young, the author of “Night Thoughts,” whose “Conjectures on Original Composition” was published in 1759:  Robert Wood, whose “Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer” (1768) was translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert Lowth, Bishop of Oxford, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford delivered there in 1753 his “Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum,” translated into English and German in 1793.  The significance of Young’s brilliant little essay, which was in form a letter addressed to the author of “Sir Charles Grandison,” lay in its assertion of the superiority of genius to learning and of the right of genius to be free from rules and authorities.  It was a sort of literary declaration of independence; and it asked, in substance, the question asked in Emerson’s “Nature”:  “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Pope had said, in his “Essay on Criticism,"[16] “follow Nature,” and in order to follow Nature, learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer.  “Nature