Instead of settling in Italy, as he intended, Lessing accepted in 1770 the office of librarian at Wolfenbiittel, offered to him by the hereditary prince of Brunswick. The debts which he had con tracted in Hamburg weighed heavily on him, and he missed his friends; his health, too, which had hitherto been excellent, gradu ally gave way. In 1775 he travelled for nine months in Italy with Prince Leopold of Brunswick, and in the following year he mar ried Eva Konig, the widow of a Hamburg merchant, with whom he had been on terms of intimate friendship. But their happiness lasted only for a brief period; in 1778 she died in childbed.
Soon after settling in Wolfenbiittel, Lessing found in the li brary the manuscript of a treatise by Berengarius of Tours on transubstantiation in reply to Lanfranc. This was the occasion. of Lessing's powerful essay on Berengarius, in which he vindi cated the latter's character as a serious and consistent thinker. In 1771 he published his Zerstreute Anmerkungen fiber das Epi gramm, und einige der vornehmsten Epigrammatisten. No other critic has offered so many pregnant hints as to the laws of epi grammatic verse, or defended with so much force and ingenuity the character of Martial. In 1772 he published Emilia Galotti, a tragedy handling a subject suggested by the Roman legend of Virginia, but conceived in the spirit of the "tragedy of common life." Lessing then occupied himself for some years almost exclu sively with the treasures of the Wolfenbiittel library. The re sults of these researches he embodied in a series of volumes, Zur Geschichte and Literatur, the first being issued in 1773, the last in the year of his death.
written with a grace, vivacity and energy that give them perma nent value.
The Brunswick Government having, in deference to the con-. sistory, confiscated the Fragments and ordered Lessing to dis continue the controversy, he resolved, as he wrote to Elise Rei marus, the author's daughter, to try "whether they would let him preach undisturbed from his old pulpit, the stage." In Nathan der Weise, written in the winter of 1778-79, he gave poetic form to the ideas which he had already developed in prose. Its governing conception is that noble character may be associated with the most diverse creeds, and that there can, therefore, be no good reason why the holders of one sect of religious principles should not tolerate those who maintain wholly different doctrines. The play, which is written in blank verse, is too obviously a con tinuation of Lessing's theological controversy to rank high as poetry, but the representatives of the three religions—the Mo hammedan Saladin, the Jew Nathan and the Christian Knight Templar—are finely conceived, and show that Lessing's dramatic instinct had, in spite of other interests, not deserted him. In 178o appeared Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, the first half of which he had published in 1777 with one of the Fragments. This work, composed of Too brief paragraphs, was the last, and is one of the most suggestive of Lessing's writings. The doctrine on which its argument is based is that no dogmatic creed can be regarded as final, but that every historical religion had its share in the development of the spiritual life of mankind. Lessing also maintains that history reveals a definite law of progress, and that occasional retrogression may be necessary for the advance of the world towards its ultimate goal.
These ideas formed a striking contrast to the principles both of orthodox and of sceptical writers in Lessing's day, and gave a wholly new direction to religious philosophy. Another work of Lessing's last years, Ernst and Falk (a series of five dialogues, of which the first three were published in 1777, the last two in 1780), also sets forth many new points of view. Its nominal subject is freemasonry, but its real aim is to plead for a humane and charit able spirit in opposition to a narrow patriotism, an extravagant respect for rank and exclusive devotion to any particular church.