A vivacious dispute followed between the indignant publisher and his impudent detractors.

At length Briere appealed to the great Jove of Weimar.

Goethe expressed his conviction that Briere's text was the genuine text of the original, and this was held to settle the question.

Yet Goethe's voucher for its correspondence with the copy handed to him by Schiller was not really decisive evidence.

He admits that he executed the translation very rapidly, and had no time to compare it closely with the French.