HOFFMANN, ERNST THEODOR WILHELM (1776-1822), German romance-writer, was born at Konigsberg on the 24th of January 1776. For the name Wilhelm he himself substituted Amadeus in homage to Mozart. His parents lived unhappily together, and when the child was only three they separated. His bringing up was left to an uncle who had neither understanding nor sympathy for his dreamy and wayward temperament. Hoffmann showed more talent for music and drawing than for books. In 1792, when little over sixteen years old, he entered the university of Konigsberg, with a view to preparing himself for a legal career. The chief features of interest in his student years were an intimate friendship for Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1775-1843), a nephew of the novelist Hippel, and an unhappy passion for a lady to whom he gave music lessons; the latter found its outlet, not merely in music, but also in two novels, neither of which he was able to have published. In the summer of 1795 he began his practical career as a jurist in Konigsberg, but his mother's death and the complications in which his love-affair threatened to involve him made him decide to leave his native town and continue his legal apprenticeship in Glogau. In the autumn of 1798 he was transferred to Berlin, where the beginnings of the new Romantic movement were in the air. Music, however, had still the first place in his heart, and the Berlin opera house was the chief centre of his interests. In 1800 further promotion brought him to Posen, where he gave himself up entirely to the pleasures of the hour. Unfortunately, however, his brilliant powers of caricature brought him into ill odour, and instead of receiving the hoped-for preferment in Posen itself, he found himself virtually banished to the little town of Plozk on the Vistula. Before leaving Posen he married, and his domestic happiness alleviated to some extent the monotony of the two years' exile. His leisure was spent in literary studies and musical composition. In 1804 he was transferred to Warsaw, where, through J. E. Hitzig (1780-1849), he was introduced to Zacharias Werner, and began to take an interest in the later Romantic literature; now, for the first time, he discovered how writers like Novalis, Tieck, and especially Wackenroder, had spoken out of his own heart. But in spite of this literary stimulus, his leisure in Warsaw was mainly occupied by composition; he wrote music to Brentano's _Lustige Musikanten_ and Werner's _Kreuz an der Ostsee_, and also an opera _Liebe und Eifersucht_, based on Calderon's drama _La Banda y la Flor_.