imagination against the rules of French critics, very much as the Wartons
and Bishop Hurd did a few years later in England. _Deutscheit,
Volkspoesie_, the German past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the
_Kaiserzeit_ and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into fashion. "As
early as 1748 Bodmer had published specimens from the Minnesingers, in
1757 he had brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 1759 a
more complete collection of the Minnesingers, and till 1781, till just
before his death, he continued to produce editions of the Middle
High-German poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich Myller, a
pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 and 1785 the whole of the
Nibelungenlied and the most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing,
in his preface to Gleim's 'War-songs,' called attention to the Middle
High German poets, of whom he continued to be throughout his life an
ardent admirer. Justus Möser took great interest in the Minnesingers.
About the time when 'Götz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German
poetry was at its strongest, and Bürger, Voss, Miller, and Höltz wrote
Minnesongs, in which they imitated the old German lyric poets. In 1773
Gleim published 'Poems after the Minnesingers,' and in 1779 'Poems after
Walther von der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already hailed the
Nibelungenlied as the German Iliad, and Bürger, who vied hard with the
rest, but without much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted on
dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the Nibelungen style. He and a
few other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character.
Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, 'Mein
Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the
song of the old Swabian knight--'Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem
Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 'Nathan,' too, appealed to this
enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the
feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Müller, began to show the
Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the