Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 4.djvu/188

168 ever, because much confidence was placed in him as an excellent jurist, he managed to exercise quietly, both in the Frankfort and the imperial courts, under assumed signatures, was already sixty years old when I took writing-lessons with his son, and so came into his house. His figure was tall without being thin, and broad without corpulency. You could not look, for the first time, on his face, which was not only disfigured by smallpox, but deprived of an eye, without apprehension. He always wore on his bald head a perfectly white bell-shaped cap, tied at the top with a ribbon. His morning-gowns, of calamanco or damask, were always very clean. He dwelt in a very cheerful suite of rooms on the ground-floor by the Allée, and the neatness of everything about him corresponded with this cheerfulness. The perfect arrangement of his papers, books, and maps produced a favourable impression. His son, Heinrich Sebastian, afterward known by various writings on art, gave little promise in his youth. Good-natured but dull, not rude but blunt, and without any special liking for instruction, he rather sought to avoid the presence of his father, as he could get all he wanted from his mother. I, on the other hand, grew more and more intimate with the old man, the more I knew of him. As he attended only to important cases, he had time enough to occupy and amuse himself in another manner. I had not long frequented his house, and heard his doctrines, before I could well perceive that he stood in opposition to God and the world. One of his favourite books was "Agrippa de Vanitate Scientiarum," which he especially commended to me, and so set my young brains in a considerable whirl for a long time. In the happiness of youth I was inclined to a sort of optimism, and had again pretty well reconciled myself with God or the gods; for the experience of a series of years had taught me that there was much to counterbalance evil, that