Germany from the Earliest Period, vol 4

he discoveries of the New World in a colloquial romance contained in a thick folio volume, was the most extravagant of these scribblers. The romances of Antony Ulric, duke of Brunswick, who embraced Catholicism on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter with the emperor Charles VI., are equally bad. Lauremberg's satires, written A.D. 1564, are excellent. He said with great truth that the French had deprived the German muse of her nose and had patched on another quite unsuited to her German ears. Moscherosch (Philander von Sittewald) wrote an admirable and cutting satire upon the manners of the age, and Greifenson von Hirschfeld is worthy of mention as the author of the first historical romance that gives an accurate and graphic account of the state of Germany during the thirty years' war.

This first school was succeeded by a second of surpassing extravagance. Hoffman von Hoffmannswaldau, A.D. 1679, the founder of the second Silesian school, was a caricature of Opitz, Lohenstein of Gryphius, Besser of