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forced, as if he suspects both men of not appreciating each other as much as they should. Bräker may have seemed at first like a successor to Gujer (who was born in 1716 and so roughly contemporary with Bräker's father), and he did indeed have some of the same virtues, but he could never have been held up as an example of successful "economy". Hirzel became president of the Physical Society, dedicated to reform of agriculture and other sciences, in 1790, but lost all his official posts at the Revolution He died at Zürich in 1803.

Salomon Gessner:

Salomon Gessner was born in 1730 into a patrician family in Zürich; his father was a publisher. The young Gessner was thought in his boyhood to be of low intelligence, and even when he became famous some of his acquaintances thought he looked more of an idiot than a genius. He was sent to live in the country with a tutor, and low expectations rendered him less well educated than most writers of his time, he had no knowledge of Greek and not much of Latin. He was much influenced by reading the poetry of B.H. Brockes, a collection called "Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott" [Earthly pleasure in God], much of which was poems in praise of Nature.

In 1749 he was sent to Berlin as an apprentice to a publisher, but showed so little interest that he was eventually sacked. He was more interested in learning to draw, paint and write poetry. His reputation for being rather stupid may have been enhanced by a story that when trying to teach himself painting he mixed the colours in olive oil instead of linseed! Next year he returned home to work for his father and later became a partner in the firm Orell, Gessner and Füssli. Twice a week he met with a literary group which included Hirzel, Hottinger, Füssli and others. Most were pupils of Bodmer, but Gessner kept aloof because he did not wish to be under Bodmer's thumb as the poets Klopstock and Wieland had been. He supported Füssli and Lavater in their campaign against Felix Grebel, and was a founder member of the Helvetic Society.

Gessner became famous chiefly for his pastoral poetry, particularly the "Idyllen" [Idylls], published in 1756, and "Abels Tod" [Death of Abel] two years later. A second series of Idylls was published in 1772, after which Gessner gave up writing poetry and turned to engraving and painting. His poetry was enormously popular and read all over Europe, especially in France, and it had many imitations, most of them much inferior. His success was partly due to his bringing new life into the genre of pastoral poetry, which had already been popular for about half a century, but had become very stilted and overly concerned with shepherds who were merely city folk in disguise. Gessner set out to portray peasant life more realistically, though still using classical poets such as Theocritus as his model. In his preface to the Idylls, however, he gives reasons for not setting his poetry in modern Switzerland: better to set it in a past golden age when peasants were not "...condemned to work of the hardest kind to procure for the prince and the inhabitant of the town a superfluity of abundance, groaning under the weight of oppression and wretchedness which have made him brutal, servile and sly" [as quoted by G. Reynold, p 612].

Further mentions after their meeting in 1782 show that Bräker maintained an interest in pastoral poetry in general and in Gessner in particular. It is interesting that Gessner, like Bräker, often used dashes instead of more formal punctuation. Gessner became one of the "sights" of literary Europe and was besieged by foreign visitors, which he sometimes found rather a nuisance. He died of a stroke in 1788.

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