Most women were putty in the old man's hands, but Claire Quincy had pushed all the wrong buttons and short-circuited his good nature.
He became (1756-1759) the leading spirit of Nicolai's important literary undertakings, the Bibliothek and the Literaturbriefe, and ran some risk (which Frederick's good nature obviated) by somewhat freely criticizing the poems of the king of Prussia.
Bluff good-nature, a certain jocoseness, a humour pungent and ready, though somewhat coarse, a hot or even violent disposition, are characteristics of Mahratta chieftains.
Again, the appeal to " God's judgment " in the trial by battle in Lohengrin is a subject of which no earlier librettist could have made more than a plausible mess - which is the best that can be said for the music as music. But as dramatist Wagner compels our respect for the power that without gloss or apology brings before us the king, a model of royal fair-mindedness and good-nature, acquiescing in Telramund's monstrous claim to accuse Elsa without evidence, simply because it is a hard and self-evident fact that the persons of the drama live in an age in which such claims seemed reasonable.
Even then Rousseau did not settle at once in the anomalous but to him charming position of domestic lover to this lady, who, nominally a converted Protestant, was in reality, as many women of her time were, a kind of deist, with a theory of noble sentiment and a practice of libertinism tempered by good nature.
