BESIDES translating twenty-two of Shakespeare’s plays, translating and annotating Cicero’s “Letters,” the “Satires” and “Epistles” of Horace, and the “Dialogues” of Lucian, Wieland found time to fill fifty-three volumes with original poems, plays, romances, essays, and philosophical treatises on almost, if not quite, every imaginable subject, from the most spiritual speculation to “Komische Erzählungen,” the grossness of which surprised and shocked his admirers.

  He was born near Biberach, in Swabia, September 5th, 1733. His father, who was a clergyman, educated him carefully. While still at the University of Tübingen, he wrote his poem on “The Nature of Things,” his “Moral Letters” and “Moral Tales,” as well as a poem on “Spring” and a work entitled “Anti-Ovid.” His writings of this period express an ascetic and repressive view of life, which he afterwards modified, concluding finally that the best philosophy of life is that which promotes self-possession and the temperate realization of all the possibilities of constructive experience. After living at Zurich from 1752 to 1759 and at Biberach as director in Chancery from 1760 to 1769, he was made professor of Philosophy and Literature at Erfurt,—a position he left in 1772 to become tutor to Prince Charles Augustus at Weimar, where he remained until his death, January 20th, 1813.