With such literary baggage, fortified with personal recommendations and introductions from the Head Master at Hof, with a Certificate of Maturity and a testimonium paupertatis that might entitle him to remission of fees and possibly free board, Richter went to Leipzig.  From the academic environment and its opportunities he got much, from formal instruction little.  He continued to be in the main self-taught and extended his independence in manners and dress perhaps a little beyond the verge of eccentricity.  Meantime matters at home were going rapidly from bad to worse.  His grandfather had died; the inheritance had been largely consumed in a law-suit.  He could not look to his mother for help and did not look to her for counsel.  He suffered from cold and stretched his credit for rent and food to the breaking point.  But the emptier his stomach the more his head abounded in plans “for writing books to earn money to buy books.”  He devised a system of spelling reform and could submit to his pastor friend at Rehau in 1782 a little sheaf of essays on various aspects of Folly, the student being now of an age when, like Iago, he was “nothing if not critical.”  Later these papers seemed to him little better than school exercises, but they gave a promise soon to be redeemed in Greenland Law-Suits, his first volume to find a publisher.  These satirical sketches, printed early in 1783, were followed later in that year by another series, but both had to wait 38 years for a second edition, much mellowed in revision—­not altogether to its profit.

The point of the Law-Suits is directed especially against theologians and the nobility.  Richter’s uncompromising fierceness suggests youthful hunger almost as much as study of Swift.  But Lessing, had he lived to read their stinging epigrams, would have recognized in Richter the promise of a successor not unworthy to carry the biting acid of the Disowning Letter over to the hand of Heine.

The Law-Suits proved too bitter for the public taste and it was seven years before their author found another publisher.  Meanwhile Richter was leading a precarious existence, writing for magazines at starvation prices, and persevering in an indefatigable search for some one to undertake his next book, Selections from the Papers of the Devil.  A love affair with the daughter of a minor official which she, at least, took seriously, interrupted his studies at Leipzig even before the insistence of creditors compelled him to a clandestine flight.  This was in 1784.  Then he shared for a time his mother’s poverty at Hof and from 1786 to 1789 was tutor in the house of Oerthel, a parvenu Commercial-Counsellor in Toepen.  This experience he was to turn to good account in Levana and in his first novel, The Invisible Lodge, in which the unsympathetic figure of Roeper is undoubtedly meant to present the not very gracious personality of the Kommerzienrat.