In this same way had the wardrobe which I took with me to the university been furnished:  it was very complete and handsome, and there was even a laced suit amongst the rest.  Already accustomed to this kind of attire, I thought myself sufficiently well dressed; but it was not long before my female friends, first by gentle raillery, then by sensible remonstrances, convinced me that I looked as if I had dropped down out of another world.  Much as I felt vexed at this, I did not see at first how I was to mend matters.  But when Herr von Masuren, the favorite poetical country squire, once entered the theatre in a similar costume, and was heartily laughed at, more by reason of his external than his internal absurdity, I took courage, and ventured at once to exchange my whole wardrobe for a new-fashioned one, suited to the place, by which, however, it shrunk considerably.

When this trial was surmounted, a new one was to come up, which proved to be far more unpleasant, because it concerned a matter which one does not so easily put off and exchange.

I had been born and bred in the Upper-German dialect; and although my father always labored to preserve a certain purity of language, and, from our youth upwards, had made us children attentive to what may be really called the defects of that idiom, and so prepared us for a better manner of speaking, I retained nevertheless many deeper-seated peculiarities, which, because they pleased me by their naivete, I was fond of making conspicuous, and thus every time I used them incurred a severe reproof from my new fellow-townsmen.  The Upper-German, and perhaps chiefly he who lives by the Rhine and Main (for great rivers, like the seacoast, always have something animating about them), expresses himself much in similes and allusions, and makes use of proverbial sayings with a native common-sense aptness.  In both cases he is often blunt:  but, when one sees the drift of the expression, it is always appropriate; only something, to be sure, may often slip in, which proves offensive to a more delicate ear.

Every province loves its own dialect; for it is, properly speaking, the element in which the soul draws its breath.  But every one knows with what obstinacy the Misnian dialect has contrived to domineer over the rest, and even, for a long time, to exclude them.  We have suffered for many years under this pedantic tyranny, and only by reiterated struggles have all the provinces again established themselves in their ancient rights.  What a lively young man had to endure from this continual tutoring, may be easily inferred by any one who reflects that modes of thought, imagination, feeling, native character, must be sacrificed with the pronunciation which one at last consents to alter.  And this intolerable demand was made by men and women of education, whose convictions I could not adopt, whose injustice I thought I felt, though I was unable to make it plain to myself.  Allusions to the pithy biblical texts were to be forbidden