"Now as
formerly," he wrote to Oeser, "art is almost my chief occupation." But
he also found time for wide excursions into the fields of general
literature. Before leaving Leipzig he had exchanged with Langer "whole
baskets-full" of German poets and critics for Greek authors, and these
(though his knowledge of Greek remained to the end elementary) he
must have read in a fashion. Latin authors he read were Cicero,
Quintilian, Seneca, and Pliny. Among the moderns Shakespeare and
Moliere already held the place in his estimation which they always
retained. 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.
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