me, as well as the use of the honest-hearted expressions from the Chronicles.  I had to forget that I had read the “Kaiser von Geisersberg,” and eschew the use of proverbs, which nevertheless, instead of much fiddle-faddle, just hit the nail upon the head,—­all this, which I had appropriated to myself with youthful ardor, I was now to do without:  I felt paralyzed to the core, and scarcely knew any more how I had to express myself on the commonest things.  I was, moreover, told that one should speak as one writes, and write as one speaks; while to me, speaking and writing seemed once for all two different things, each of which might well maintain its own rights.  And even in the Misnian dialect had I to hear many things which would have made no great figure on paper.

Every one who perceives in this the influence which men and women of education, the learned, and other persons who take pleasure in refined society, so decidedly exercise over a young student, would be immediately convinced that we were in Leipzig, even if it had not been mentioned.  Each one of the German universities has a particular character; for, as no universal cultivation can pervade our fatherland, every place adheres to its own fashion, and carries out, even to the last, its own characteristic peculiarities:  exactly the same thing holds good of the universities.  In Jena and Halle roughness had been carried to the highest pitch:  bodily strength, skill in fighting, the wildest self-help, was there the order of the day; and such a state of affairs can only be maintained and propagated by the most universal riot.  The relations of the students to the inhabitants of those cities, various as they might be, nevertheless agreed in this, that the wild stranger had no regard for the citizen, and looked upon himself as a peculiar being, privileged to all sorts of freedom and insolence.  In Leipzig, on the contrary, a student could scarcely be any thing else than polite, as soon as he wished to stand on any footing at all with the rich, well-bred, and punctilious inhabitants.

All politeness, indeed, when it does not present itself as the flowering of a great and comprehensive mode of life, must appear restrained, stationary, and, from some points of view, perhaps, absurd; and so those wild huntsmen from the Saale [Footnote:  The river on which Halle is built.—­TRANS.] thought they had a great superiority over the tame shepherds on the Pleisse. [Footnote:  The river near Leipzig.—­TRANS.] Zachariae’s “Renommist” will always be a valuable document, from which the manner of life and thought at that time rises visibly forth; as in general his poems must be welcome to every one who wishes to form for himself a conception of the then prevailing state of social life and manners, which was indeed feeble, but amiable on account of its innocence and child-like simplicity.