When the critics of the middle of the eighteenth century discuss the conditions of the German stage at that time, they invariably complain of the great losses caused to it by the untimely death of several young and promising authors. Brawe, Cronegk, and J. E. Schlegel are mentioned in this way; and their names are still remembered, if their works are forgotten. Together with these we repeatedly find a name that nowadays seems almost to have dropped out of the memory of the historians of literature. Yet the young Nicolaï was just as eager to praise Johann Christian Krüger as those other three men, and regretted that he, too, by a premature death, had been prevented from fulfilling what his early productions had promised. For a long time confused with Gottsched's unlucky disciple, B. E. Krüger, Johann Christian Krüger's personality and writings only now begin to be understood.