seemed cultivated as an art. Digressions interrupt
the narrative with slender excuse, or with none; there is, as with the
English Sterne, an obtrusion of the author's personality; the style
seems as wilfully crude as the mastery in word-building and
word-painting is astonishing. On the other hand there is both greater
variety and greater distinction in the characters, a more developed
fabulation and a wonderful deepening and refinement of emotional
description. _Werther_ was not yet out of fashion and lovers of his
"Sorrows" found in _Hesperus_ a book after their hearts. It
established the fame of Jean Paul for his generation. It brought women
by swarms to his feet. They were not discouraged there. It was his
platonic rule "never to sacrifice one love to another," but to
experiment with "simultaneous love," "_tutti_ love," a "general
warmth" of universal affection. Intellectually awakened women were
attracted possibly as much by Richter's knowledge of their feelings as
by the fascination of his personality. _Hesperus_ lays bare many
little wiles dear to feminine hearts, and contains some keenly
sympathetic satire on German housewifery.

While still at work on _Hesperus_ Jean Paul returned to his mother's
house at Hof. "Richter's study and sitting-room offered about this
time," says Doering, his first biographer, "a true and beautiful
picture of his simple yet noble mind, which took in both high and low.
While his mother bustled about the housework at fire or table he sat
in a corner of the same room at a plain writing-desk with few or no
books at hand, but only one or two drawers with excerpts and
manuscripts. * * * Pigeons fluttered in and out of the chamber."

At Hof, Jean Paul continued to teach with originality and much success
until 1796, when an invitation from Charlotte von Kalb to visit Weimar
brought him new interests and connections. Meanwhile, having finished
_Hesperus_ in July, 1794, he began work immediately on the genial
_Life of Quintus Fixlein, Based on Fifteen Little Boxes of Memoranda_,
an idyl, like _Wuz_, of the schoolhouse and the parsonage, reflecting
Richter's pedagogical interests and much of his personal experience.
Its satire of philological pedantry has not yet lost pertinence or
pungency. Quintus, ambitious of authorship, proposes to himself a
catalogued interpretation of misprints in German books and other tasks
hardly less laboriously futile. His creator treats him with unfailing
good hum