powers on the thorough exploration of the limited field of grammar, metre, and textual criticism. His works include a treatise on the Greek and Latin moods and tenses (1786), and on accentuation (1791). In the province of metre he was the first to introduce into Germany the opinions of Bentley, whom he was in the habit of describing as 'the most perfect pattern of a critic'. These opinions he set forth in a brief treatise', and applied in an edition of the Rudens. Specially interested in Aristotle, he anonymously contributed to the criticism of the Rhetoric and the seventh and eighth books of the Politics, besides publishing a text of the treatise on Poetry (1786). He also edited the first four books of Herodotus. Finally, he prepared a full description of De France's cabinet of antiques at Vienna, and a series of lectures on Roman Antiquities, published after his death. His greatest glory lies in the fact that he was the preceptor of Hermann and that he was highly praised by Wolf3.

1 'Burmannum de Bentleii doctrina metrorum Terentianorum judicare non potuisse' (1787).

2 Described by a reviewer as 'the beginning of the true criticism of

Plautus'.

3 Bursian, i 419-422.

CHAPTER XXVII.

GERMANY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

(ii) WINCKELMANN, LESSING, HERDER, HEYNE, ECKHEL.

In the eighteenth century the study of Classical Archaeology received an important impulse from the teaching of J. F. Christ Johann Friedrich Christ (1700-1756). Born of a good family in Coburg, he was a man of many accomplishments as an artist, a linguist, and a poet; he studied law at Jena, and professed history and poetry at Leipzig (1734). As a specialist in Latin literature, he was a constant student of Plautus, knew Horace by heart, had a high admiration for Juvenal, read Tacitus through once a year, and keenly appreciated and frequently imitated Aulus Gellius. By travelling in Italy he became an expert in ancient and modern art; and he gathered round him a large library and a considerable collection of engravings, coins, and gems. In a memorable course of lectures he urged his audience to become familiar, not only with the literature, the inscriptions, and the coins of the ancients, but also with their architecture and sculpture, their gems and their vases. These lectures, which were published long afterwards, mark the beginning of archaeological teaching in Germany'. In studying the monuments of antiquity from the artistic and aesthetic, and not merely from the antiquarian, point of view, he resembled his French contemporary, the Count de Caylus, while, in his appreciation of the distinctive style of Greek sculpture, he was a precursor of Winckel

1 Ed. Zeune, Abhandlungen über die Litteratur und Kunstwerke, vornehmlich des Alterthums, 1776.

mann.

He made a special study of gems, publishing a catalogue of the Richter collection at Leipzig, and a revised Latin version of the descriptive letter-press to the first 2000 casts in Lippert's Dactyliotheca, a work subsequently completed by Heyne. His varied interests are attested in the thirty-two papers on Roman law and antiquities, on textual criticism, and on the history of literature and of scholarship, collected in his Noctes Academicae (1727-9). He also dealt with the monograms of artists, the vasa myrrhina of the ancients, and the various representations of the Muses. In support of his fantastic opinion that the fables of Phaedrus were composed by the Italian humanist, Perotti', he himself translated two books of Aesop into Latin verse. On his death in 1756 a Latin oration in his memory was delivered by Ernesti', who, with the aid of manuscript copies of his predecessor's lectures, continued the tradition of his teaching. But the abiding influence of the original lectures themselves is better exemplified by the fact that it was from this source that Lessing and Heyne derived their earliest interest in ancient art3.

Winckelmann

While an interest in the artistic side of ancient life had been thus awakened by J. F. Christ, the permanent recognition of its importance was due to the genius of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). The son of a cobbler at Stendal (about sixty miles W. of Berlin), he succeeded in learning Latin at the local school, and in acquiring a certain knowledge of books in his master's library, while the prehistoric tombs in the neighbourhood awakened his interest in ancient monuments, and led to his even dreaming of a pilgrimage to the Pyramids. In 1735 he went to Berlin, to spend a year in learning Greek under Damm, who was undoubtedly familiar with the vocabulary of Homer. Three years later he left Stendal to

1 ii 71 supra.

2 Opusc. Orat., 171–182.

3 Cp. Justi's Winckelmann, i 374—381; Stark, 159f; Dörffel, J. F. Christ, sein Leben u. seine Schriften (1878); and Bursian, i 404-6.—The year of his death was also that of the death of the pupil of Christ and Ernesti, Johann August Bach (1721-56), who vindicated the character of the Eleusinian Mysteries (1745), discussed the legislation of Trajan, edited the Oeconomicus of Xenophon (1747) and wrote an oft-reprinted history of Roman Jurisprudence (1754). Cp. Bursian i 406 f.

.

complete his schooling at a place still further west, Salzwedel. In the same year Fabricius died, and, two years afterwards, when his books were to be sold by auction in Hamburg, the young student walked all the way, a distance of more than eighty miles, simply to purchase a few copies of the Greek and Latin Classics'. He soon entered the university of Halle, where he attended the lectures of J. H. Schulze, a collector of coins, who discoursed on Greek and Roman antiquities, and of A. G. Baumgarten, who, a few years later, was the first to apply the term 'Aesthetics' to the science of the beautiful3. He continued his studies at Jena, where, with a view to the medical profession, he worked at comparative anatomy. His early interest in miscellaneous learning was, however, soon afterwards merged in a keen admiration for Greek literature, and, during five years of hardship as a school-master at Seehausen, N. of his native place, he devoted the greater part of his nights to the study of Homer and Sophocles, and Herodotus, Xenophon, and Plato. The six years that he subsequently spent in the library of the Count von Bünau, near Dresden, enlarged his interest in history and politics, and in the literature of France, England, and Italy (1748-54). At that time the finest collection of works of sculpture and painting in all Germany was to be found in Dresden; and it soon became clear to Winckelmann that the study of art was henceforth to be the main purpose of his life. It was also clear that he could not continue that study, to any serious purpose, without living in Italy, and, as the only means for carrying out this design, he finally resolved on joining the Church of Rome. But it was not until a year later that the grant of an annual pension from the Elector of Saxony enabled him to start for the South. He employed the interval in studying gems and other examples of ancient art, and in composing his earliest work, 'Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek works in Painting and Sculpture' (1755). In words that soon became memorable he here describes Greek art as characterised by 'a noble simplicity and a calm grandeur". The first two years of his residence in

1

1 Justi, i 42.

2 ib. i 54-6.

3 ib. i 75-80.

4

1743-8; ib. i 136–160.

5

11 July, 1754.

6 p. 21 (p. 314 of 'Selected Works', ed. J. Lessing) eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Grösse, a phrase probably inspired by Oeser (Justi, i 349, 410).

Rome were devoted to studying the great galleries of Sculpture and describing some of the finest works of ancient art in the Vatican Museum. He afterwards spent three months in Naples, examining the results of the recent excavation of Herculaneum and Pompeii. He also visited the great Greek temples at Paestum and Girgenti. In 1760 he produced a descriptive Catalogue of the Stosch Collection of gems in Florence, dedicating his work to the Cardinal Albani, who had already received him into his house and had made him his librarian and supervisor of his fine collection of ancient sculptures. Meanwhile, he had been studying the descriptions of works of Greek art in Pausanias, and the Greek conception of the Beautiful in Plato. All these studies culminated in the two quarto volumes of his classic 'History of Ancient Art' (1764), the earliest book in which the developement of the art of Egypt, of Phoenicia and Persia, of Etruria, and of Greece and Rome, is set forth in connexion with the general developement of political life and civilisation. The work was received with enthusiasm, and a second edition appeared in 1776. Meanwhile, in 1767-8, he had produced the two volumes of his Monumenti Antichi Inediti, describing more than two hundred works of ancient art, mainly reliefs from Roman sarcophagi, in the explanation of which he had shown for the first time that the designs were derived, not from the scenes of ordinary life, but from the legends of Greek mythology. In the following April, he left Rome for the North. The mountains of Tirol, which had inspired him with wonder on his journey into Italy, now awoke in him a sense of the profoundest melancholy. He was bound for Berlin, where he proposed to see through the press a French edition of his great History. During his stay in Augsburg, Munich and Vienna, he strove in vain to throw off the intense depression by which he was haunted; from Vienna he returned alone to Triest, and arranged to cross the water to Venice. While he was preparing for his voyage, he lived incognito for several days at a hotel, where he became imprudently familiar with an Italian adventurer, indiscreetly showed him some of the large gold medals he had recently received at Vienna, and was treacherously murdered on the 8th of June, 1768. The date of his birth, the 9th of December, has since been repeatedly commemorated by