The great rhetorical art-critic of our own day refers to it in words of disparagement, and in truth it has none of the flummery of modern criticism.

It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of _Laokoeon_ (1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them.

Lessing was so struck with the _Inquiry_ that he set about a translation of it, and the correspondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on the questions which Burke had raised contains the germs of the doctrine as to poetry and painting which _Laokoeon_ afterwards made so famous.

Its influence on Lessing and on Kant was such as to justify the German historian of the literature of the century in bestowing on it the coveted epithet of epoch-making.
The book is full of crudities.

We feel the worse side of the eighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst for Variety in architecture is sure to leave very little true taste; or that an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; or that sad fuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity.