At a time when German was generally despised as a barbaric tongue, Salomon Gessner was hailed in Europe as a poet of universal significance. Yet today he is scarcely known. John Hibberd sets the writer in context, traces the story of his impact, and stresses his significance as a key to the taste of his age. He finds the reasons for Gessner's remarkable success in his appeal to the feeling for nature and natural simplicity nascent in the mid-eighteenth century, and in his ability to be many things to many men by reconciling the main cultural trends of that time - Pre-Romanticism and...