d on the stone floor. His son Andreas followed in the
footsteps of his father, combining a commercial career with country
pursuits. He died in 1794 at Ohra, where he had purchased an estate, and
to which he had retired to spend his closing years. His wife (the
grandmother of Arthur) survived him for some years, although shortly
after his death she was declared insane and incapable of managing her
affairs. This couple had four sons: the eldest, Michael Andreas, was
weak-minded; the second, Karl Gottfried, was also mentally weak and had
deserted his people for evil companions; the youngest son, Heinrich
Floris, possessed, however, in a considerable degree the qualities which
his brothers lacked. He possessed intelligence, a strong character, and
had great commercial sagacity; at the same time, he took a definite
interest in intellectual pursuits, reading Voltaire, of whom he was more
or less a disciple, and other French authors, possessing a keen
admiration for English political and family life, and furnishing his
house after an English fashion. He was a man of fiery temperament and
his appearance was scarcely prepossessing; he was short and stout; he
had a broad face and turned-up nose, and a large mouth. This was the
father of our philosopher.

When he was thirty-eight, Heinrich Schopenhauer married, on May 16,
1785, Johanna Henriette Trosiener, a young lady of eighteen, and
daughter of a member of the City Council of Dantzic. She was at this
time an attractive, cultivated young person, of a placid disposition,
who seems to have married more because marriage offered her a
comfortable settlement and assured position in life, than from any
passionate affection for her wooer, which, it is just to her to say, she
did not profess. Heinrich Schopenhauer was so much influenced by English
ideas that he desired that his first child should be born in England;
and thither, some two years after their marriage, the pair, after making
a _detour_ on the Continent, arrived. But after spending some weeks in
London Mrs. Schopenhauer was seized with home-sickness, and her husband
acceded to her entreaties to return to Dantzic, where a child, the
future philosopher, was shortly afterwards born. The first five years of
the child's life were spent in the country, partly at the Stuthof which
had formerly belonged to Andreas Schopenhauer, but had recently come
into the possession of his maternal grandfather.

Five years after the birth of his