Gumpertz himself, who has become famous through his entreaty to Magister Gottsched at Leipsic, whilom absolute monarch in German literature: "I would most respectfully supplicate that it may please your worshipful Highness to permit me to repair to Leipsic to pasture on the meadows of learning under your Excellency's protecting wing." After seven years of struggle and privation, Moses Mendelssohn became tutor at the house of Isaac Bernhard, a silk manufacturer, and now began better times. In spite of faithful performance of duties, he found leisure to acquire a considerable stock of learning. He began to frequent social gatherings, his friend Dr. Gumpertz introducing him to people of culture, among others to some philosophers, members of the Berlin Academy. What smoothed the way for him more than his sterling character and his fine intellect was his good chess-playing. The Jews have always been celebrated as chess-players, and since the twelfth century a literature in Hebrew prose and verse has grown up about the game. Mendelssohn in this respect, too, was the heir of the peculiar gifts of his race. In a little room two flights up in a house next to the Nicolai churchyard lived one of the acquaintances made by Mendelssohn through Dr. Gumpertz, a young newspaper writer--Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Lessing was at once strongly attracted by the young man's keen, untrammelled mind. He foresaw that Mendelssohn would "become an honor to his nation, provided his fellow-believers permit him to reach his intellectual maturity. His honesty and his philosophic bent make me see in him a second Spinoza, equal to the first in all but his errors."[79] Through Lessing, Mendelssohn formed the acquaintance of Nicolai, and as they were close neighbors, their friendship developed into intimacy. Nicolai induced him to take up the study of Greek, and old Rector Damm taught him. At this time (1755), the first coffee-house for the use of an association of about one hundred members, chiefly philosophers, mathematicians, physicians, and booksellers, was opened in Berlin. Mendelssohn, too, was admitted, making his true entrance into society, and forming many attachments. One evening it was proposed at the club that each of the members describe his own defects in verse; whereupon Mendelssohn, who stuttered and was slightly hunchbacked, wrote: "Great you call Demosthenes, Stutt'ring orator of Greece; Hunchbacked Æsop you deem wise;-- In your circle, I surmise, I am doubly wise and great. What in each was separate You in me united find,-- Hump and heavy tongue combined."