158 ACCOUNT of the GERMAN THEATRE, 



protection and fupport chiefly from perfons engaged in com- 

 merce, the firft theatres of any eminence being built by the 

 merchants of Leipfic and Hamburg. After the conclufion of 

 the laft war, however, the theatre appears to have received 

 confiderable encouragement at Vienna, Berlin, Manheim and 

 Drefden. 



About this period, the tafte for fentimental and pathetic 

 writing began to be wonderfully prevalent in Germany. The 

 works of Sterne, and feveral other Engliih authors of the 

 fame clafs, were read with the greateft avidity. I remember to 

 have been told of a club or fociety, inftituted at fome town in 

 Germany, whofe name was taken from the fnuff-box, which 

 forms a ftriking incident in the celebrated ftory of the monk 

 in the Sentimental Journey. The Poems of Wieland, Gesner, 

 Weisse, &c. are full of the mod refined fentiment and fenfibi- 

 lity ; and the celebrated Sorrows of Werter of Goethe carries 

 thofe qualities to that enthufiaftic height, which has fo much 

 captivated the young and the romantic of every country it has 

 reached *. This prevalence of highly refined fentiment feems 

 commonly the attendant of newly-introduced literature, when 

 letters are the property of a few fecluded men, and have not 

 yet allied themfelves to the employments or the feelings of fo- 

 ciety. The fame thing took place at the revival of letters in 

 Europe after the long night of the middle ages. The Platonic 

 Jove of the ancient romance, and of the poetical dialogue of 

 the Provencals, was the produce of the fame high- wrought and 

 metaphyfical fentiment, which is the natural refult of fancy 

 and feeling, untutored by a knowledge of the world, or the 

 intercourfe of ordinary life. 



We are not therefore to wonder, if, amidfl what we might 

 be apt to term refinement in point of fentiment and expremon, 



we 



* Soon after the publication of that little work, it became a badge of fafhion among 

 the young men of Germany, to wear as a uniform the drefs which Werter is defcribed 

 as having on in one of his interviews with Charlotte. 



