The home in which Fräulein Lavater had grown up, in happy companionship of her brothers and sisters, under the guidance of their excellent mother, was a comfortable old-fashioned house in Hanau, surrounded by a pretty garden of considerable size. A genial and healthy spirit animated the whole household; the inhabitants of the little town prided themselves on the literary and artistic interests which they considered had been wafted over to them from Frankfort, the Frankfort of Goethe’s days; they read much, and were fond of meeting together for philosophic discussion as well as for amateur acting. Those were still the good old honest simple times in which living was so cheap that an excellent mid-day meal, a slice of a roast joint with vegetables, bread and ale, could be had for three kreuzers, and in which young girls made their own simple white muslin ball-dresses, and embroidered them in coloured wools, wearing the same dress contentedly for a dozen dances; and assuredly they looked just as pretty and attractive in their modest attire as do the young women of the present day in the extravagant toilettes on which such preposterous sums are spent, often bringing ruin on a whole family. That so-called period of stagnation at which it is so easy to sneer, was in reality but the necessary reaction after the too great tension, the strain and stress of the War of Liberation, a rest after the storm, in which the nation might recuperate its energies, exhausted by the long conflict. No one talked then of national antipathies or hereditary enmities; and religious strife was also unknown. It was, at all events, a peaceful happy existence which people led in Hanau, as in many another of the smaller German towns, in which little colonies of French Protestants, driven out of their own country by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had settled down. There was something so distinctive about these worthy people, something that seemed to differentiate them from their compatriots of the Catholic Faith, and that has sometimes set me wondering as to what other possible turn affairs might have taken for France and for Europe in consequence, had Henry IV instead of hearing his first Mass thrown the whole weight of his influence into the other side of the scale, and brought his countrymen over to his religion! However that may be, it is certain that the presence of these foreigners gave Hanau something cosmopolitan, that the tone of thought and feeling which prevailed there was exceptionally liberal and enlightened. Anglophobia had not yet been invented in Germany, on the contrary, one admired and imitated everything English, looking up to the English nation as the most highly civilised of all.