t hour of the Spring of 1763 at Wunsiedel in the
Fichtelgebirge, the very heart of Germany. The boy was christened
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter. His parents called him Fritz. It was
not till 1793 that, with a thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he called
himself Jean Paul.

Place and time are alike significant in his birth. Wunsiedel was a
typical German hill village; the ancestry, as far back as we can trace
it, was typically German, as untouched as Wunsiedel itself, by any
breath of cosmopolitan life. It meant much that the child who was in
later life to interpret most intimately the spirit of the German
people through the days of the French Revolution, of the Napoleonic
tyranny and of the War of Liberation, who was to be a bond between the
old literature and the new, beside, yet independent of, the men of
Weimar, should have such heredity and such environment. Richter's
grandfather had held worthily minor offices in the church, his father
had followed in his churchly steps with especial leaning to music; his
maternal grandfather was a well-to-do clothmaker in the near-by town
of Hof, his mother a long-suffering housewife. It was well that Fritz
brought sunshine with him into the world; for his temperament was his
sole patrimony and for many years his chief dependence. He was the
eldest of seven children. None, save he, passed unscathed through the
privations and trials of the growing household with its accumulating
burdens of debt. For Fritz these trials meant but the tempering of his
wit, the mellowing of his humor, the deepening of his sympathies.

When Fritz was two years old the family moved to Joditz, another
village of the Fichtelgebirge. Of his boyhood here Jean Paul in his
last years set down some mellowed recollections. He tells how his
father, still in his dressing gown, used to take him and his brother
Adam across the Saale to dig potatoes and gather nuts, alternating in
the labor and the play; how his thrifty mother would send him with the
provision bag to her own mother's at Hof, who would give him goodies
that he would share with some little friend. He tells, too, of his
rapture at his first A B C book and its gilded cover, and of his
eagerness at school, until his too-anxious father took him from
contact with the rough peasant boys and tried to educate him himself,
an experience not without value, at least as a warning, to the future
author of _Levana_. But if the Richters were proud, they were very
p