  Herder’s first major work in aesthetics, Fragments on Recent German Literature, appeared in 1767, when he was only twenty-three. The first three volumes of his next work, the Groves of Criticism (Kritische Waelder) were published in 1769. The first volume of the Groves is a spirited but friendly critique of Lessing’s Laocoön, the next two a detailed polemic against the now forgotten Halle rhetorician Christian Klotz (whom Lessing also attacked in a 1769 essay on “How the Ancients Depicted Death”). The fourth volume, a polemic against the now equally forgotten Friedrich Justus Riedel, who had published a hodgepodge Theory of the Fine Arts and Sciences: Extracts from various Authors in 1767, remained unpublished during Herder’s lifetime. Herder did, however, restate its most important ideas in Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, begun in 1770 although itself not completed and published until 1778. Herder’s work on Sculpture was interrupted by several of what are now his best-known works, the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) and This Too a Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity (1774). After finishing Sculpture, Herder published a collection of folk poetry from around the world, Popular Songs (1778–79), a work on the Old Testament, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–83), the large work on philosophy of history already mentioned, an influential defense of Spinoza under the name of God: Some Conversations (1787), a work on political philosophy, the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–97), and finally his critiques of Kant’s theoretical philosophy and aesthetics, A Metacritique on the Critique of Pure Reason (1799) and the Kalligone or “Birth of Beauty” (1800).  In these works Kant’s harsh criticisms of his quondam student’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Humanity were repaid with interest.