Brought up under very favourable circumstances, ardent and energetic, and endowed with the highest natural gifts, the young Marx speedily assimilated the best learning that. Germany could then provide. At the universities of Bonn and Berlin he studied law to please his father, but following his own bent he gave his time much more to history and philosophy. Hegel was still about the zenith of his influence, and Marx was a zealous student, and for some time an adherent of the reigning school. In 1841 Marx finished his studies and gained the degree of doctor with an essay on the philosophy of Epicurus. This was destined to close his connection with the German universities. He had intended to settle at Bonn as teacher of philosophy, but the treatment which his friend Bruno Bauer as teacher of theology in the same university experienced at the hands of the Prussian minister Eichhorn, deterred him from following out his purpose. In truth, Marx’s revolutionary temperament was little suited to the routine of the German man of learning, and the political conditions of Prussia gave no scope for free activity in any department of its national life. Marx therefore could only enter the ranks of the opposition, and early in 1842 he joined the staff of the _Rhenish Gazette_, published at Cologne as an organ of the extreme democracy. He was for a short time editor of the paper. During his connection with it he carried on an unsparing warfare against the Prussian reaction, and left it before its suppression by the Prussian Government, when it sought by compromise to avoid that fate. In the same year, 1843, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, who belonged to a family of good position in the official circles of the Rhine country. Her brother was subsequently Prussian minister. It was a most happy marriage. Through all the trials and privations of a revolutionary career Marx found in his wife a brave, steadfast, and sympathetic companion. Soon after his marriage Marx removed to Paris, where he applied himself to the study of the questions to which his life and activity were henceforward to be entirely devoted. All his life he appears to have worked with extraordinary intensity. At Paris he lived in close intercourse with the leading French socialists; with Proudhon he often spent whole nights in the discussion of economic problems. His most intimate associates, however, were the German exiles. Arnold Ruge and he edited the _Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher_. He met also the greatest of the German exiles, Heine, and is said to have had a share in suggesting to the poet the writing of the celebrated _Wintermärchen_.