Herder's most important aesthetic claims are grounded in detailed engagement with specific works, such as those of Ossian and Shakespeare.

We may now turn to Herder’s second main criticism of Lessing, hinted at in the first of the Groves of Criticism but more fully developed in the unpublished fourth Grove and the essay on Sculpture. The fourth Grove is cast as a critique of Riedel’s Theory of the Fine Sciences and Arts, as earlier noted, but also continues the debate with Lessing. Herder begins with several methodological objections to Riedel. First, although he otherwise admires Baumgarten, Herder criticizes Riedel’s acceptance o