For his suggestions he has been much ridiculed.
Learning, indeed, was often ridiculed as pedantry in a gentleman of good family.
The metre is monotonous and easily ridiculed, but it suits the subject, and the poem is very popular.
His biting wit involved him in many controversies with well-known contemporaries, such as Lavater, whose science of physiognomy he ridiculed, and Voss, whose views on Greek pronunciation called forth a powerful satire, Ober die Pronunciation der Schopse des alten Griechenlandes (1782).
In this discourse "he impugned the idea of the existence of any visible church at all, ridiculed the value of any tests of orthodoxy, and poured contempt upon the claims of the church to govern itself by means of the state."
