Before the _Lodge_ was out of press Jean Paul had begun _Hesperus, or 45 Dog-post-days_, which magnified the merits of the earlier novel but also exaggerated its defects. Wanton eccentricity was given fuller play, formlessness seemed cultivated as an art. Digressions interrupt the narrative with slender excuse, or with none; there is, as with the English Sterne, an obtrusion of the author's personality; the style seems as wilfully crude as the mastery in word-building and word-painting is astonishing. On the other hand there is both greater variety and greater distinction in the characters, a more developed fabulation and a wonderful deepening and refinement of emotional description. _Werther_ was not yet out of fashion and lovers of his "Sorrows" found in _Hesperus_ a book after their hearts. It established the fame of Jean Paul for his generation. It brought women by swarms to his feet. They were not discouraged there. It was his platonic rule "never to sacrifice one love to another," but to experiment with "simultaneous love," "_tutti_ love," a "general warmth" of universal affection. Intellectually awakened women were attracted possibly as much by Richter's knowledge of their feelings as by the fascination of his personality. _Hesperus_ lays bare many little wiles dear to feminine hearts, and contains some keenly sympathetic satire on German housewifery. While still at work on _Hesperus_ Jean Paul returned to his mother's house at Hof. "Richter's study and sitting-room offered about this time," says Doering, his first biographer, "a true and beautiful picture of his simple yet noble mind, which took in both high and low. While his mother bustled about the housework at fire or table he sat in a corner of the same room at a plain writing-desk with few or no books at hand, but only one or two drawers with excerpts and manuscripts. * * * Pigeons fluttered in and out of the chamber."