But how could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing, imitate the of Machiavelli, who in his Principe makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he ventures to present long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts, and a of the gallop, and of the best, wantonest humour?