unfortunately, had not the happy gift of dealing with young people, of winning their confidence, and of guiding them, for the moment, as occasion might require.  When I visited him I never got any good by it:  his wife, on the contrary, showed a genuine interest in me.  Her ill health kept her constantly at home.  She often invited me to spend the evening with her, and knew how to direct and improve me in many little external particulars:  for my manners were good, indeed; but I was not yet master of what is properly termed etiquette.  Only one friend spent the evenings with her; but she was much more dictatorial and pedantic, for which reason she displeased me excessively:  and, out of spite to her, I often resumed those unmannerly habits from which the other had already weaned me.  Nevertheless she always had patience enough with me, taught me piquet, ombre, and similar games, the knowledge and practice of which is held indispensable in society.

But it was in the matter of taste that Madame Boehme had the greatest influence upon me,—­in a negative way truly, yet one in which she agreed perfectly with the critics.  The Gottsched waters [Footnote:  That is to say, the influence of Gottsched on German literature, of which more is said in the next book.—­TRANS.] had inundated the German world with a true deluge, which threatened to rise up, even over the highest mountains.  It takes a long time for such a flood to subside again, for the mire to dry away; and as in any epoch there are numberless aping poets, so the imitation of the flat and watery produced a chaos, of which now scarcely a notion remains.  To find out that trash was trash was hence the greatest sport, yea, the triumph, of the critics of those days.  Whoever had only a little common sense, was superficially acquainted with the ancients, and was somewhat more familiar with the moderns, thought himself provided with a standard scale which he could everywhere apply.  Madame Boehme was an educated woman, who opposed the trivial, weak, and commonplace:  she was, besides, the wife of a man who lived on bad terms with poetry in general, and would not even allow that of which she perhaps might have somewhat approved.  She listened, indeed, for some time with patience, when I ventured to recite to her the verse or prose of famous poets who already stood in good repute,—­for then, as always, I knew by heart every thing that chanced in any degree to please me; but her complaisance was not of long duration.  The first whom she outrageously abused were the poets of the Weisse school, who were just then often quoted with great applause, and had delighted me very particularly.  If I looked more closely into the matter, I could not say she was wrong.  I had sometimes even ventured to recite to her, though anonymously, some of my own poems; but these fared no better than the rest of the set.  And thus, in a short time, the beautiful variegated meadows at the foot of the German Parnassus, where I was fond of luxuriating, were mercilessly mowed down; and I was even compelled to toss about the drying hay myself, and to ridicule that as lifeless which, a short time before, had given me such lively joy.