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
"Laocoön," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber
naïve 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