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These will be fair excuses, if your performance should fall something short; though I do not apprehend that it will. While you have been at Leipsig, which is a place of study more than of pleasure or company, you have had all opportunities of pursuing your studies uninterruptedly; and have had, I believe, very few temptations to the contrary.
For my own part, I judge of every man's truth by his degree of understanding. This letter will, I suppose, find you at Leipsig; where I expect and require from you attention and accuracy, in both which you have hitherto been very deficient.
Cyr, with 20,000, was at Pirna, on the great pass from Bohemia; Oudinot at Leipsig, with 60,000; while with the Emperor himself at Dresden remained 25,000 of the imperial guard, the flower of France.
I succeeded in this, but alas, Goethe was already dead. I had made the acquaintance of his daughter-in-law Mrs. von Goethe, born at Pogwitsch, at the house of Mendelssohn Bartholdy, in Leipsig, on my return from Constantinople; this spirituelle lady received me with much kindness.
I saw a first edition of The Robbers in a shop in the Georg Platz. I went in and asked the price. It was a rum old chap behind the counter. He said: 'Twenty-five marks, and went on reading. I told him I had seen a better copy only a few days before for twenty one talks like that when one is bargaining; it is understood. He asked me 'Where? I told him in a shop at Leipsig.
Gallant as the behaviour of his troops had been, the result satisfied Napoleon that he must finally retreat from Leipsig; and he now made a sincere effort to obtain peace.
Your climate, at this time of the year especially, delights more in the wood fire, than in the poetic fire; and I conceive the Muses, if there are any at Leipsig, to be rather shivering than singing; nay, I question whether Apollo is even known there as god of Verse, or as god of Light: perhaps a little as god of Physic.
As soon as you leave Leipsig, you will gradually be going into the great world; where the first impressions that you shall give of yourself will be of great importance to you; but those which you shall receive will be decisive, for they always stick. To keep good company, especially at your first setting out, is the way to receive good impressions.
I also expect that you make yourself perfectly master of the German language; which you may very soon do there, if you please. I give you fair warning, that at Leipsig I shall have an hundred invisible spies about you; and shall be exactly informed of everything that you do, and of almost everything that you say.
What inclination for courts this taste of them may have given you, I cannot tell; but this I think myself sure of, from your good sense, that in leaving Dresden, you have left dissipation too; and have resumed at Leipsig that application which, if you like courts, can alone enable you to make a good figure at them.