Lessing undoubtedly had better uses for his breath than to spend
it in shouting for either side in this "bloody lawsuit," as he called it,
in which he was not concerned. He showed himself German enough, and in
the right way, in his persistent warfare against the tyranny of French
taste.
He remained in Breslau the better part of five years, studying life in
new phases, gathering a library, which, as commonly happens, he
afterwards sold at great loss, and writing his _Minna_ and his _Laocooen_.
He accompanied Tauentzien to the siege of Schweidnitz, where Frederick
was present in person. He seems to have lived a rather free-and-easy life
during his term of office, kept shockingly late hours, and learned, among
other things, to gamble,--a fact for which Herr Stahr thinks it needful
to account in a high philosophical fashion. We prefer to think that there
are _some_ motives to which remarkable men are liable in common with the
rest of mankind, and that they may occasionally do a thing merely because
it is pleasant, without forethought of medicinal benefit to the mind.
Lessing's friends (whose names were _not_, as the reader might be tempted
to suppose, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) expected him to make something
handsome out of his office; but the pitiful result of those five years of
opportunity was nothing more than an immortal book.
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