“The darkest period of our hero’s life was when he fled from Leipsic and went down in disguise to Hof. The lawsuit had stripped his mother of the little property she inherited from the cloth-weaver, [her father,] and she had been obliged to part with the respectable homestead where the honest man had carried on his labours. She was now living with one or more of Paul’s brothers, in a small tenement, containing but one apartment, where cooking, washing, cleaning, spinning, and all the bee-hive labours of domestic life must go on together. “To this small and over-crowded apartment, which henceforth must be Paul’s only study, he brought his twelve volumes of extracts, a head that in itself contained a library, a tender and sympathising heart--a true, high-minded, self-sustaining spirit. His exact situation was this: The success of the first and second volumes of his ‘Greenland Lawsuits’ had encouraged him to write a third--a volume of satires, under the singular name of ‘Selections from the Papers of the Devil;’ but for this we have seen he had strained every nerve in vain to find a publisher. This manuscript, therefore, formed part of the little luggage which his friend Oerthel had smuggled out of Leipsic. It was winter, and from his window he looked out upon the cold, empty, frozen street of the little city of Hof, or he was obliged to be a prisoner, without, as he says, ‘the prisoner’s fare of bread and water, for he had only the latter; and if a gulden found its way into the house, the jubilee was such, that the windows were nearly broken with joy.’ At the same time he was under the ban of his costume martyrdom: this he could have laughed at and reformed; but hunger and thirst were actual evils, and when of prisoner’s food he had only the thinner part, he could well exclaim, as Carlyle has said-- ‘Night it must be e’er Friedland’s star will beam’ “Without was no help, no counsel, but there lay a giant force within; and so, from the depths of that sorrow and abasement, his better soul rose purified and invincible, like Hercules from his long labours. “‘What is poverty,’ he said, at this time, ‘that a man should whine under it? It is but like the pain of piercing the ears of a maiden, and you hang precious jewels in the wound.’” The “costume martyrdom” here mentioned, is a most characteristic affair; and as a great man’s character is often revealed most strikingly in small matters, we shall give it at length. Partly from fancy, partly from necessity, Paul had adopted a peculiar style of dress, entirely at variance with the fashion of the day. He writes to his mother:--