Richter belonged now to Germany, and should have been transferred immediately, you will think, like Göethe, Schiller, Wieland, Herder, and the other _Dii majorum gentium_, to WEIMAR, the one literary capital of Deutschland; for _political_ capital it neither had then nor has now, nor in the common course of things, notwithstanding the songs of 1813 and the _Zoll-Verein_, is ever like to have. And in Weimar, no doubt, there were some men who looked upon the apparition of the Richter comet with a more favourable eye than senatorian Göethe. Old Father Wieland, in particular, “who had read Tristram Shandy eighty times over,” called him “our Yorick, our Rabelais, the purest spirit!”--and the earnest Herder, with his capacious sympathy, was able to appreciate the religious and Christian element in Paul’s character, which naturally was a mystery to the author of Agathon. Taken as a whole, however, Weimar, with Göethe as its real king and god, was by no means the proper element for Richter. There was too much mere literature in it for one with whom goodness was the one thing needful, and greatness only an accident, agreeable or disagreeable, as the case might be. There was too much head in Weimar, and too little heart. Freedom, indeed, there was, in grand style, from all those civic formalities, and minute observation of small points, which had vexed him so much in Hof. But what one might complain of there, to use his own words, was “PAINTED EGOTISM AND UNPAINTED SCEPTICISM;”--the French Voltaire in a German Avatar! For the true Teut, Richter, that would never do. We are not, therefore, to be surprised if the visit which Paul made to Weimar in 1796, though full of joy and exhilaration, was not followed up by any permanent change in his quiet and retired mode of life. His native secluded region of the Fichtelgebirge was still to be his home. Hof and Bayreuth, in the centre of central Germany, and therefore out of every body’s way, were to boast the possession of this the most German of great German men. How little attraction there was between the calm, cold, artistical contemplativeness of Göethe, and the bickering sportiveness of sunny joy in the essentially moral nature of Richter, the following extract will declare:--