Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born of affluent parents, August 28, 1749, at Frankfort on the Main. He attended successively the universities of Leipzig and Strasburg; and, in 1771, took a doctor’s degree in jurisprudence; but from his early youth literature was his ruling passion. In his twenty-fourth year he had already acquired unexampled popularity by his original and daring tragedy of ‘Götz von Berlichingen,’ published in 1773. In 1774 he gained a European celebrity by the ‘Sorrows of Werter;’ and he had already rendered himself an object of admiration to the young, and of terror to the timid, by the publication of several pungent satirical writings, when his good genius guided to the vicinity of Frankfort the young Duke of Saxe Weimar, who was about to assume the government on coming of age. In accepting the friendship, and taking up his residence at the court of this prince, Goethe entered on an unvarying career of prosperity. For a few years the young Duke and his friend led a life of gaiety, of which there are many curious anecdotes current in Germany; but, during a joyous and somewhat wild life, the intellectual singularly prevailed over the sensual. Even during that course of dissipation, the most important of Goethe’s works were commenced, though none of them were published until after his return from Italy. That country he visited in 1786, and to the time which he spent in it he ever after recurred with delight. Though Shakspeare was the individual poet he most prized, and Greek the literature which he held up as the rule of all excellence, Italy was the land of his affections. He remained two winters in Rome. Here he cultivated the studies of archaeology and the fine arts, which he had begun to practise in his youth, but now abandoned for poetry and the study of nature.