JEAN PAUL RICHTER

(1763-1825)

BY E. P. EVANS

EAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER was born as the "twin brother of spring," on March 21st, 1763, at Wunsiedel, a little town of the Fichtelgebirge in the principality of Bayreuth, where his father was assistant schoolmaster and organist. His mother, Sophie Rosina, was the daughter of a clothier, Johann Paul Kuhn, who plied his trade in Hof, an important manufacturing centre situated on a spur of the above-mentioned pine-clad range of mountains. On the next day after his birth the child was baptized. He had for his sponsors the maternal grandfather aforenamed, and a bookbinder, Johann Friedrich Thieme; the infant was therefore burdened at the font with a compound of both their names, the first of which he translated some years later into French, out of admiration for Jean Jacques Rousseau.

When the babe was scarcely five months old, he was taken to the death-bed of his grandfather Johann Richter, rector or head master of the school at Neustadt on the Kulm, in the Upper Palatinate. The dying man, like Jacob of old, laid his hand on the child and blessed him. The event left a strong impression, not so much in the actual Occurrence as in the repeated relation of it by his father in after years. "Pious grandfather," exclaims Jean Paul in his autobiography, "often have I thought of thy hand, blessing as it grew cold, when fate led me out of dark hours into brighter; and I can already hold fast to the belief in thy blessing in this world, penetrated, ruled, and animated as it is by miracles and spirits."

In the second year of his age his father became pastor of the church in Joditz, a village not far from Hof, and situated in a charming region on the Saale; where the boy passed his earliest and most impressionable years in idyllic surroundings, and cultivated that innate delicacy of feeling for the beauties of nature which finds such warm and wonderfully original expression in the writings of the

man.

Unfortunately his entire education at this period was conducted at home by his father in a desultory and very disadvantageous way, with no inkling of the pedagogical method which Pestalozzi was just then putting into practice with the charity-children of Zürich. The good pastor pursued the old preceptorial system of mechanically