that was trivial, feeble, and commonplace," would unsparingly point out their essential inanity. When he ventured to recite his own poetical attempts, her criticism was equally unsparing. The discipline was sharp, but for the "coddled" boy, who had been regarded at home as a youthful prodigy, it was entirely wholesome. Yet, if we may judge from a description of him some ten months after his arrival in Leipzig, the chastening does not appear to have lessened his buoyant self-confidence. The description is from the hand of a comrade of his own in Frankfort, Horn by name, the son of a former chief magistrate of the city. Horn, like Goethe, had come to study in Leipzig, and on his arrival there, 1766, he thus (August, 1766) records his impressions of Goethe to a common friend: "If you only saw him, you would be either furious with rage or burst with laughing. It is beyond me to understand how anyone can change so quickly. Besides being arrogant, he is also a dandy, and his clothes, though fine, are in such ridiculous taste that they attract the attention of the whole university.[21] But he does not mind that a bit, and it is useless to tell him of his follies.... He has acquired a gait which is simply intolerable. Could you only see him!" Such was Horn's first impression of his former comrade, but it is right to say that a few months later he could tell the same correspondent that they had not lost a friend in Goethe, who had still the same good heart and was as much a philosopher and a moralist as ever. [Footnote 19: Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.] [Footnote 20: In point of fact Goethe retained to the end the intonation and the idioms of his native speech.] [Footnote 21: In his Autobiography Goethe states as the reason for his casting off the home-made suit he had brought with him from Frankfort, that a person entering the Leipzig theatre in similar costume excited the ridicule of the audience.] In his second letter Horn gives a singular reason for the preposterous airs which Goethe had lately put on. Goethe, wrote Horn, had fallen in love with a girl "beneath him in rank," and his antics were assumed to disguise the fact from his friends who might report it to his father. Goethe's relations to this girl were to be his liveliest experience in Leipzig, and an experience frequently to be repeated at different periods of his life. Like his other adventures of the same nature, it was to supply him with a fund of emotions and reflections which at a future day were to serve him as literary capital. The tale of his passion, if passion it was, is, therefore, an essential part of his biography, both as a man and a literary artist.