For the rest, he had studied well, was particularly versed in the modern languages and their literature, and wrote an excellent hand.  He was very well disposed towards me; and I, having been always accustomed and inclined to the society of older persons, soon attached myself to him.  My intercourse served him, too, for a special amusement; since he took pleasure in taming my restlessness and impatience, with which, on the other hand, I gave him enough to do.  In the art of poetry he had what is called taste,—­a certain general opinion about the good and bad, the mediocre and tolerable:  but his judgment was rather censorious; and he destroyed even the little faith in contemporary writers which I cherished within me, by unfeeling remarks, which he knew how to advance with wit and humor, about the writings and poems of this man and that.  He received my productions with indulgence, and let me have my own way, but only on the condition that I should have nothing printed.  He promised me, on the other hand, that he himself would copy those pieces which he thought good, and would present me with them in a handsome volume.  This undertaking now afforded an opportunity for the greatest possible waste of time.  For before he could find the right paper, before he could make up his mind as to the size, before he had settled the breadth of the margin and the form of handwriting, before the crow-quills were provided and cut into pens, and Indian ink was rubbed, whole weeks passed, without the least bit having been done.  With just as much ado he always set about his writing, and really, by degrees, put together a most charming manuscript.  The title of the poems was in German text; the verses themselves in a perpendicular Saxon hand; and at the end of every poem was an analogous vignette, which he had either selected somewhere or other, or had invented himself, and in which he contrived to imitate very neatly the hatching of the wood-cuts and tail-pieces which are used for such purposes.  To show me these things as he went on, to celebrate beforehand in a comico-pathetical manner my good fortune in seeing myself immortalized in such exquisite handwriting, and that in a style which no printing-press could attain, gave another occasion for passing the most agreeable hours.  In the mean time, his intercourse was always secretly instructive, by reason of his liberal acquirements, and, as he knew how to subdue my restless, impetuous disposition, was also quite wholesome for me in a moral sense.  He had, too, quite a peculiar abhorrence of roughness; and his jests were always quaint without ever falling into the coarse or the trivial.  He indulged himself in a distorted aversion from his countrymen, and described with ludicrous touches even what they were able to undertake.  He was particularly inexhaustible in a comical representation of individual persons, as he found something to find fault with in the exterior of every one.  Thus, when we lay together at the window, he could occupy