Perhaps one more
my own, yet hardly one with which my understanding would in the long
run have been so well content." Diderot's choice of prose was
dictated and justified by the accentual poverty of his mother-tongue,
Lessing certainly revised his judgment on this point (for it was not
equally applicable to German), and wrote his maturer "Nathan" in what
he took for blank verse. There was much kindred between the minds of
the two men. Diderot always seems to us a kind of deboshed Lessing.
Lessing was also indebted to Burke, Hume, the two Wartons, and Hurd,
among other English writers. Not that he borrowed anything of them
but the quickening of his own thought. It should be remembered that
Rousseau was seventeen, Diderot and Sterne sixteen, and Winckelmann
twelve years older than Lessing. Wieland was four years younger.
[162] Goethe's appreciation of Lessing grew with his years. He writes
to Lavater, 18th March, 1781: "Lessing's death has greatly depressed
me. I had much pleasure in him and much hope of him." This is a
little patronizing in tone. But in the last year of his life, talking
with Eckermann, he naturally antedates his admiration, as
reminiscence is wont to do: "You can conceive what an effect this
piece (_Minna_)had upon us young people.
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