Produced by Jana Srna, Ernest Schaal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) LETTERS OF A LUNATIC, OR A BRIEF EXPOSITION OF MY UNIVERSITY LIFE, DURING THE YEARS 1853-54. BY G. J. ADLER, A. M., PROFESSOR OF GERMAN LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE CITY OF NEW-YORK, MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ORIENTAL, AND OF THE AMERICAN ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETIES, &C., &C. Spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici? Horat. Ars Poet. v. 5. [Greek: me ny toi ou chraisme skeptron kai stemma theoio]! Iliad I. v. 28. PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR. 1854. PREFATORY NOTE TO THE PUBLIC. IN a recent publication on German Literature, I hinted to the reader my design of giving an account of an event in my personal history, which I alleged to be the cause of an absentment from my proper place of study, and consequently of an injustice to my public. I now proceed to fulfil my promise, by offering to my personal friends, and to such as are interested in matters of academic education and morality, a few of the many letters written by me during the past year. I might have added others, both of an anterior and of a more recent date. The question however was not to write a volume, but simply a brief exposition, of a page or two from my life in connection with a public institution of the metropolis, and thus to bring a matter of private and iniquitous dispute before the forum of the public, after having vainly sought redress in private. My main object was of course to vindicate and defend my character, my professional honor and my most sacred rights as a rational man and as a public educator, against the invasions of narrow-minded and unjust aggressors, whose machinations have for several years been busily at work in subverting what other men have reared before them, in retarding and impeding what the intelligence of our age and country is eager to accelerate and to promote. The much agitated question of University reform and of the liberty of academic instruction, which of late years has engaged the attention of some of the best intellects on both sides of the Atlantic, and which within a month past has again occupied the public mind, and even called forth legislative intervention may, however, perhaps likewise receive some additional light from the following pages, which I now submit, not from any motive of vanity, or from the expectation of self-aggrandisement or of histrionic applause; but from a sense of duty to the cause of liberal culture and of sound