Hoffmann created most of his principal characters in his own image. His whole life resolved itself into moods. We see from his diary how anxiously and minutely he observed these. We come on such entries as: "Romantically religious mood; excitedly humorous mood, leading finally to those thoughts of madness which so often force themselves upon me; humorously discontented, highly-wrought musical, romantic moods; extremely irritable mood, romantic and capricious in the highest degree; strange, excited, but poetic gloominess; very comfortable, brusque, ironical, overstrained, morose, perfectly weak moods; extraordinary, but miserable moods; moods in which I felt deep veneration for myself and praised myself immoderately; _senza entusiasmo, senza esaltazione_, every-day moods," &c., &c. We seem to see the man's spiritual life spread and split itself up fan-wise into musical high and low spirits. It is easy to guess from this register of moods that Hoffmann, genuine lover of night as he was, was in the habit of going to bed towards morning, after having spent the evening and night in a tavern. Romanticism having thus dissolved the Ego, proceeds to form fantastic Egos, adding here, taking away there. Take, for an example, Hoffmann's _Klein Zaches_, the little monster who has been endowed by a fairy with the peculiarity "that everything good that others think, say, or do in his presence is attributed to him; the result being that in the society of handsome, refined, intelligent persons he also is taken to be handsome, refined, and cultured--is taken, in short, for a model of every species of perfection with which he comes in contact." When the student reads aloud his charming poems, it is Zaches who is credited with them; when the musician plays or the professor performs his experiments, it is Zaches who gets the honour and the praise. He grows in greatness, becomes an important man, is made Prime Minister, but ends his days by drowning in a toilet-basin. Without overlooking the satiric symbolism of the story, I draw attention to the fact that the author has here amused himself by endowing one personality with qualities properly belonging to others, in other words, by dissolving individuality and disregarding its limits. With the same satirical intention, the same idea is worked out more ingeniously, though more roughly, by Hostrup, the Dane, in his comedy, _En Spurv i Tranedans_ ("A Sparrow among the Cranes" = a dwarf among the giants), in which each one of the other characters attributes to the comical young journeyman tailor the qualities which he himself values most.