Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 13.djvu/75



the month of October, 1765, Goethe, aged sixteen, arrived in Leipsic, to commence his collegiate life, and to lay, as he hoped, the solid foundation of a future professorship. He took lodgings in the Feuerkugel, between the Old and New Markets, and was by the rector of the university inscribed on the 19th as student "in the Bavarian nation." At that period, and until quite recently, the university was classed according to four "nations," viz., the Meisnian, the Saxon, the Bavarian, and the Polish. When the inscription was official, the "nations" were what in Oxford and Paris are called "tongues;" when not official, they were students' clubs, such as they exist to this day. Goethe, as a Frankforter, was placed in the Bavarian.

If the reader has any vivid recollection of the Leipsic chapters in the Autobiography, let me beg him to dismiss them with all haste from his mind; that very work records the inability of recalling the enchanting days of youth "with the dimmed powers of an aged mind;" and it is evident that the calm narrative of his Excellency J. W. von Goethe very inaccurately represents the actual condition of the raw, wild student, just escaped from the paternal roof, with money which seems unlimited, with the world before him which his genius is to conquer. His own letters, and the letters