CHAPTER XI.

The German Tributary

Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in
Great Britain had been self-developed and independent of foreign
influence, except for such stimulus as it had found, once and again, in
the writings of continental scholars like Sainte Palaye and Mallet. But
now the English literary current began to receive a tributary stream from
abroad. A change had taken place in the attitude of the German mind
which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have
been following. In Germany, French classicism had got an even firmer
hold than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the Great
(1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a barbarous dialect, hardly fit
for literary use. In his own writings, prose and verse, he invariably
employed French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his youth up he
had not read a German book.[1]

But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of
the publication of Thomason's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school,
under the leadership of the Züricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a
national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought
under Milton's banner, and in the preface to his prose translation of
"Paradise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles.
In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous,"
1740) he asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired