music, and, two years after the birth of Jean Paul,* resigned the practice of the latter, and dedicated himself to the former, having accepted the place of pastor in the village of Joditz,whether moved to the change by the urgency of spiritual or of corporeal hunger, the son humorously leaves undivulged. "I never could take much interest in the dispute among the Grecian cities about the birth-place of Homer: the true birthplace is that of the first and longest education," says Jean Paul on the occasion of the removal to Joditz, which village, according to this definition, was his own birth-place; for here was spent the important epoch between two and twelve, described in the second Lecture with such freshness and pregnancy, the wisdom of age sporting with the memories of youth. Every kind of learning was delightful to him:-"Gladly would I, like to a Prince, have received instruction from half a dozen teachers at once; but I had hardly one good one." First he had the village schoolmaster, and then his own father, who devoted four hours in the morning and three in the afternoon to giving Paul and his brothers instruction; which instruction consisted entirely in making them get sentences, catechisms, Latin words and grammar, by rote, a method, says the principal pupil," especially to be recommended to all teachers, as with no other is so much time and trouble saved as by this most convenient one, where the pupil has in the book a substitute or adjunct of the teacher." He even intimates, that sometimes they learnt without the master more than with him; for when a fine summer day tempted the father to a long walk, a harder lesson was set to the boys, the additional difficulty doing the part of his presence in keeping them at work. Nay, such an extension does this principle of instruction admit of, that by its aid our autobiographer declares, he will confidently undertake, seated in his study in Bavaria, to teach entire schools in America, sending by the post directions of what the scholars are to get daily by rote, and having on the spot any common person to hear them repeat their prescribed task.

To a Jean Paul, who, provided he have the opportunities of self-instruction, has small need of outward aid, it matters little by what method or want of method his so-called instructors proceed with him; accordingly, while his brothers beside him could not swallow their daily prescription of words, to say nothing of not digesting the matter in them, we find him not

* He is better known by his Christian name, thus gallicized by himself, than by his sirname.

only taking in whatever was set before him, but greedily seeking for other food through livelier channels, and laying solidly the foundation of a vast pile of learning. "His thirsty roots thrust and bent themselves in every direction to take hold and draw nourishment." He contrived time-pieces and invented sun-dials: with brush and pencil he copied whatever objects within his reach his eyes delighted in: out of Luther's Bible he extracted a theological epitome: for hours he would sit at an old piano, laboring to utter in music his fancies and feelings and all this before he had counted his twelfth year, giving evidence, by an independent striving after a wide variety of knowledge, of deep original genius and universal capabilities. Nor did he therefore take the less delight in the sports and occupations of childhood. For him, too, were the latter snows of winter "a curtain, the raising of which opened the earth for the games of spring and summer." The summer Sunday of a village pastor's son, what a golden day! As was to be looked for in one of his genial temperament, the first approaches of the master passion fall in this early period; and the precocious philosopher learnt his first lessons in love from an unconscious peasant girl, from whose blue eyes was revealed to him a new mystery, though he never got even so far as to a squeezing of hands.

In his twelfth year his father was promoted from the village of Joditz to the small town of "Schwarzenbach on the Saal," and he to the study of Greek and Hebrew. Here, moreover, he had the benefit of some superficial instruction in music, whereby, after having exhausted the musical stock of the town, he was enabled to indulge more satisfactorily in voluntaries on the piano. All the books of general literature to be mustered in Schwarzenbach he read, and among them with ecstacy, with a tingling through his veins that made his body even partake in the delight, Robinson Crusoe,--an indication this, among many others, of the influence of English literature upon the master-spirits of the German. His studies enlarged and deepened with his years, and his progress in love-making kept pace with his rapid intellectual advances; for in his account of the second affair, a kiss, snatched on a stair-way, is dwelt on with remarkable distinctness of recollection.

The second volume of the "Life" (the three Lectures filling the first,) consists of extracts from what he called his VitaBook, a kind of diary, kept irregularly for a number of years, wherein he noted down, apparently as aids to the purposed autobiobraphy, observations upon himself, his habits, feelings, peculiarities, occupations, &c., and which therefore is

a fruitful source to the biographer. We will not interrupt the chronological course of our sketch to give extracts from these curious Pauliana. Some of the most characteristic specimens from them will come up in the sequel.

On laying aside the character of a mere editor of autobiographical fragments, and assuming that of biographer, Jean Paul's friend Otto, as if to strengthen himself for the more responsible task, quotes, as motto to the third volume, the following passage from a letter written to him by Richter in 1802"I conjure thee (and dost thou not I will haunt thee) that after my death thou wilt write plainly and freely of every thing, not in the cursed tender style. O! I beg thee;-and take this passage for the motto of thy treatise." So rich, however, are the materials left by Jean Paul himself, in the form of common-place and excerpt books, and especially of letters, that the function of biographer resolves itself into only a higher degree of editorship; and so simple, open, and pure are his life and character, that the pen of venerating friendship will meet nought to tempt its veracity. The above earnest imploration may stand as simply a token of its author's own truthfulness.

In Schwarzenbach he was fortunate in making acquaintance with two men, who perceived his merits and gave him affection and assistance. The one was Voelkel, his father's chaplain, who volunteered to instruct him two hours a day, in addition to his school lessons, in geography, philosophy, and composition: the other, a clergyman by the name of Vogel, a man of wit and scholarship, who did him the priceless service of giving him free use of a large well-selected library. That he was fortunate also in nearer friends,-notwithstanding the paternal by-rote system,- we have the following touching testimony from himself:-" When I reflect what a christianly giving hand was my (maternal) grandfather's, and that I never heard of a word or trait of selfishness in my father, what cause have I to thank God." And again: "I constantly heard my father tell of his and other clergymen giving away their clothes to the poor: God! I thank thee for my father."

In his sixteenth year, a few months after he had entered the Gymnasium at Hof, his father died, "leaving five sons and some debts." In 1781, being then eighteen, he entered the University of Leipzig, furnished with a well-authenticated testimonium paupertatis, and carrying with him a letter received on the eve of his departure from his friend Vogel, which begins with these prophetic words:-" Most excellent young German man, through whom I promise in the future much to the

world, my dear friend ; —so you set out to-morrow for Leipzig. Well, go; and come not back until you are that which you ought to be and can be."

What he said with such truth at the end of his life, viz. that "he had made the most of the stuff that was in him," he might have said at the end of his Leipzig course. Not only did he studiously attend the lectures of various professors, but he read omnivorously, and also most profitably, as is shown by his Journal, wherein he registered, almost daily, pages of the independent labors of his mind, besides filling volumes with extracts from the books he went through. Of these extracts he had accumulated, before he went to Leipzig, twelve volumes of about two hundred pages each, furnished with triple indexes to facilitate reference. The Journal, whose contents astonish the reader often with the depth and precision of a matured mind, was a continuation of a similar one begun at the Hof high school, entitled "Exercises in thinking." These were only his ordinary occupations. For delay in answering a letter of his friend Vogel he apologizes as follows:-"But business crowded on business, and such business as interfered with my regular occupations ;"-and which, we add, was to be the business of his life; for he was writing, in the form of moral sketches, his first book, the first volume of which, having been previously sent in manuscript to a Leipzig professor, who gave the author faint encouragement, and to his discriminating friend Vogel, who returned it. with frank strictures and hearty praise, was published in his nineteenth year under the title of Greenland Processes, and which brought him both fame and money, the first volume yielding him about sixty dollars, and the second one hundred. Neither the fame nor the money, however, reached far; for of the former there was not enough to obtain a purchaser of his after-attempts, and the latter did not suffice to relieve his wants, moderate as they were; so that on leaving Leipzig in 1784, he was obliged to depart secretly, in order to elude some small creditors.

Now was the crisis of his life. Frustrated in his scheme for a livelihood, for it was hunger that made him publish so early; the hopes of the ardent devotee to letters crushed by accumulated disappointment,-every bookseller or author to whom he applied for several years giving him disheartening answers or none; his widowed mother's inheritance consumed, and she working hard for her daily bread, while himself went often, not supperless merely, but dinnerless to bed;-what, under this appalling pressure from without, this seeming persecution of Destiny, does Richter? despair or take to brandy, or, stifling

his aspirations, even subdue himself down to the routine of professional drudgery? Nothing of all this; but, resolute and cheerful, yielding to the spiritual impulse within him, and stinting to the utmost his bodily wants so to yield the more freely, undiscouraged by the world's rebuffs, and unseduced by its temptations, on he went, zealously unfolding his deeprooted faculties, studying and writing in the same room in which his mother washed, and cooked, and spun,-shedding sometimes, doubtless, tears, not bitter ones, but rather the calm refreshing tears which a strong honest man struggling with adversity will shed.

In the latter part of his stay at Leipzig, when hope was fast giving way to fear, he kept by him a little book which he called his Andachtbuch, literally, book of devotion, wherein, under different heads, as Sorrow, Virtue, Ambition, Anger, General Rules, he wrote down, for the becalming and fortifying of himself, a number of short sentences, of which the following are samples :

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Every evil is an exercise, and a teacher of steadfastness. "Epictetus was not unhappy.

"Wilt thou be free, cheerful, and calm; take the only means of being so not in the hands of chance,-Virtue.

"Soften thyself by painting the sufferings of thy enemy: think of him as one spiritually lame, who should be pitied.

"The angry man chains himself, his friends, his virtue and his peace, to the will of another.

"Fear not to find a proposition proved, but love truth." Goethe in his Autobiography, says :-" Our wishes are presentiments of the capabilities that are in us, harbingers of what we shall be able to furnish. What we can do, presents itself to our imagination out of us and in the future: we feel a longing for that which already we secretly possess. Thus a passionate, forward-grasping transforms the really possible into a dreamed reality."

This view, which we suspect is sound only of superior natures, finds a striking illustration in Richter. The steadfast adherence to his literary plan, of itself betokens capabilities for success: such unquenchable zeal implies inexhaustible fuel. From the annexed passage it appears, that his dream, if it be so called, of the future, was realized with almost minute accuracy. A communication to Foerster from one of Jean Paul's youthful female friends, relating to the year 1789, when he was living with his mother in Hof, is to the following effect :

"Often, when we collected round him in the evening twilight,