The social relationships of love, friendship and family are important themes in all of Lessing's dramas. Such abstract concepts as emotion, forgiveness, empathy, honor, harmony and virtue have a particular meaning in the later eighteenth century and do not necessarily correspond to twentieth- century social and moral outlooks. The object of this paper is to examine an early and late comedy and a late tragedy by Lessing, to show similarities and differences, and to point out some of the outlooks toward love, friendship and family -- variations of the same associative principle in the literature, of Sentimentality -- found in these dramas.