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1841.] large unmeaning goggle eyes; and I soon let them see that I was too old a bird to be caught by any such chaff.

I soon found that the compact I had entered into with Steinhart was one which could not last long. He first began by finding fault with some opinions I had expressed in my lectures, and which had been reported to him in a garbled form by one of the students. I told him that his informant had given him any thing but an accurate statement of what I had said; but that my philosophical opinions, whatever they might be, were the result of my own convictions, and that I never troubled my head whether they appeared right or wrong, true or false, to other people. On another occasion, when he was under the necessity of making a journey from Frankfurt to Züllichan, he requested me to continue the delivery of his lectures. "How," said I, "how can I undertake to continue your lectures, when I am not acquainted with the principles from which you started, and with the views you have been inculcating?" "Oh," said he, " you can read my lectures—you will find every thing there which I consider it proper or necessary to communicate to my pupils." Upon which I remarked, rather disdainfully, that I was not in the habit of reading my own lectures, (I always lectured extempore,) much less, therefore, would I condescend to read those of another man; and that he had better get his doorkeeper to expound his doctrines to the class. He told me to remember that I was merely his assistant; that I had no right to set myself up as a principal and independent lecturer, and that unless I was willing to stand to the very letter of our original agreement, he would not pay me a penny of my salary.

These were certainly distressing and degrading enough circumstances for a man to be placed in, but fortunately I was destined before long to be relieved from my embarrassments. About this time (1804) Kant died—an event which occasioned a vacancy in the chair of philosophy at Königsberg. Massow, the Prussian minister of public instruction, to whom I had formerly been introduced at Berlin, offered me the appointment in very flattering terms, and promised that the salary should be augmented. To succeed such a man as Kant might have been considered a proud distinction by a more eminent and ambitious person than myself, and accordingly, I at once accepted the situation. No sooner was my appointment notified in the Hamburgh Gazette, than I received congratulatory addresses from two literary societies in Italy, making me an honorary member of their learned bodies. But as I regarded these as offerings to the manes of my predecessor, and not as a tribute to my own merits, I was rude enough to send no reply to the compliments which had been paid me.

The most celebrated of my colleagues at Königsberg was Kranse—a little withered mannikin, with squinting, yet intelligent, eyes. He was professor of practical, as Kant had been of speculative, philosophy. But his true strength lay in the science of finance, in the details of which he was a consummate master. Not only was he thoroughly imbued with the principles so admirably inculcated by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, but, in the spirit of an original speculator, he had carried much further out the views of that illustrious man. Hence his lectures on political economy were much better attended than his prelections on philosophy. During his lifetime he published nothing; but after his death his writings were sent to the press by his friend and pupil Von Auerswald, the president of the Prussian board of finance: and he is now regarded, even in foreign countries, as a high authority on all subjects connected with political economy.

Some time after I had been settled at Königsberg, our town was honoured by a visit from a philosopher whom I have already introduced to the notice of the reader under somewhat different circumstances. This was the distinguished Fichte, who had now fought himself forward into a prominent place among philosophers. Perhaps, however, the scenes I am going to describe will not appear to be greatly out of keeping with that which I have already related of him in a former part of my narrative.

Fichte, distinguished as he was, was at this time a fugitive upon the face of the earth. His philosophical opinions had been pronounced heterodox by a large proportion of his countrymen—