That this is the sufficient natural history of no
original mind we need hardly say, since originality consists quite as
much in the power of using to purpose what it finds ready to its hand, as
in that of producing what is absolutely new. Perhaps we might say that it
was nothing more than the faculty of combining the separate, and
therefore ineffectual, conceptions of others, and making them into living
thought by the breath of its own organizing spirit. A great man without a
past, if he be not an impossibility, will certainly have no future. He
would be like those conjectural Miltons and Cromwells of Gray's imaginary
Hamlet. The only privilege of the original man is, that, like other
sovereign princes, he has the right to call in the current coin and
reissue it stamped with his own image, as was the practice of Lessing.
Herr Stahr's over-intensity of phrase is less offensive than amusing when
applied to Lessing's early efforts in criticism. Speaking of poor old
Gottsched, he says: "Lessing assailed him sometimes with cutting
criticism, and again with exquisite humor. In the notice of Gottsched's
poems, he says, among other things, 'The exterior of the volume is so
handsome that it will do great credit to the bookstores, and it is to be
hoped that it will continue to do so for a long time.
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