Thus a great genius for metaphysics and languages was forming itself alone, without aid.
It is curious to detect, in the character of genius, the effects of local and moral influences.

There resulted from Mendelssohn's early situation certain defects in his Jewish education, and numerous impediments in his studies.

Inheriting but one language, too obsolete and naked to serve the purposes of modern philosophy, he perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions, and in his delight of knowing many languages, he with difficulty escaped from remaining a mere philologist; while in his philosophy, having adopted the prevailing principles of Wolf and Baumgarten, his genius was long without the courage or the skill to emancipate itself from their rusty chains.

It was more than a step which had brought him into their circle, but a step was yet wanting to escape from it.
At length the mind of Mendelssohn enlarged in literary intercourse: he became a great and original thinker in many beautiful speculations in moral and critical philosophy; while he had gradually been creating a style which the critics of Germany have declared to be their first luminous model of precision and elegance.

Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in the voluminous labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his middle age oppressed by indigence and malady, and in his mature life wrestling with that commercial station whence he derived his humble independence, became one of the master-writers in the literature of his country.