Shakespeare he as yet knew only from the selections in Dodd's _Beauties_ and Wieland's translation, but he already felt his greatness, and, as we have seen, names him with Wieland and Oeser as one of his masters.

"Voltaire," he wrote to Oeser, "has been able to do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a greater one."[60] The German writers who now stood highest in his esteem were Lessing and Wieland.

Lessing's aesthetic teaching he accepted with some reserves, but this did not abate the admiration which he retained for him at every period of his life.

"Lessing! Lessing!" he wrote in the same letter to Oeser; "if he were not Lessing, I might say something.

Write against him I may not; he is a conqueror....