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how interest in Bräker's experience of war continued to predominate over interest in all other aspects of his life.

Another contentious issue which looks like being permanent is that of Bräker's personal beliefs. It is so easy to distinguish the path that he trod as he moved away from the faith of his parents and later, his wife, that many critics have assumed that in a similarly simple path he reached a position of an agnostic or lost faith altogether. In his case, however, I think that the opposite pole from fundamentalist faith was not atheism but a different kind of faith, one which allowed the expression of doubt even on the most crucial aspects of Christian belief (see, for example, his regular meditations on the Incarnation as Christmas comes round each year), but which was founded on the firmest of beliefs in the goodness of God expressed in Nature and in good deeds by good people. It took him most of his life to arrive at this position, and different critics have selected different dates as turning-points in his thinking, some as early as 1774 and some as late as 1797. My own choice is some point after joining the Moral Society - exactly when cannot be determined as the diaries for a few years are missing. When Bräker's formidable intelligence and frustrated emotions were let loose on the best scholarship of his time there could be no turning back.

Hard to find and even harder to evaluate are the short pieces (often unfinished), written into the diary. Some can confidently be judged as original - such as the criticism of Lavater and other great men, but others, though they may be delightful or moving to read, are so placed as to raise suspicion that they are derived from what Bräker has been reading recently. A good example is the dialogue of the beggar girl dying in the snow, placed with other dialogues near the end of 1788, soon after Bräker's introduction to Schubart's dialogues.

Today, publication and criticism of Bräker's work continue, but with a very high proportion of journal articles and other short pieces rather than full length books, and still centred in the Swiss German-speaking world, even though other languages such as French and English now have the pre-eminence that Greek and Latin had in his day.

Finally, one must not overlook Bräker's letters. Unfortunately only about a score remain in existence, written mostly to Imhof and Füssli, and to other members of Füssli's firm, and only brief paragraphs appear here and there in the diary. It is known, however, that he wrote others whose addressees include most of the friends, near and far, that the diary mentions. Very probably the letters preserve something of Bräker's character outside his literary work, of a man who was loved simply as good company, who would do anything to have rational conversation and cheerful faces around him.

Bräker as artist and craftsman:

All his writings have elaborate title pages full of experiments in calligraphy, and in the first entry for 1783 he describes himself as "a man who likes to write and paint" [Chronik, p 204]. Examples are reproduced elsewhere in the Chronik, for instance p 53, title page for 1771, which has sprays of flowers in green, pink, black and yellow. Some also appear reproduced on the Internet.

There are many references in Bräker's life to his skill at carpentry as a sideline to weaving. Voellmy refers twice to a wooden chest in Bräker's possession in 1761, the year of his marriage, and later left to his daughter Susanna Barbara. (v 1 p 367 and v 2 plate 11). The chest was carved with his name but Voellmy does not say definitely that Bräker made it. The photograph shows, however, that its painted decoration and the style of calligraphy in the diary were very similar.

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