present himself. "Do you know," he says in a letter,
"three great pessimists were in Italy at the same time--Byron, Leopardi,
and myself! And yet not one of us has made the acquaintance of the
other." He remained in Italy until June 1819, when he proceeded to
Milan, where he received distressing news from his sister to the effect
that a Dantzic firm, in which she and her mother had invested all their
capital, and in which he himself had invested a little, had become
bankrupt. Schopenhauer immediately proposed to share his own income with
them. But later, when the defaulting firm offered to its creditors a
composition of thirty per cent, Schopenhauer would accept nothing less
than seventy per cent in the case of immediate payment, or the whole if
the payment were deferred; and he was so indignant at his mother and
sister falling in with the arrangement of the debtors, that he did not
correspond with them again for eleven years. With reference to this
affair he wrote: "I can imagine that from your point of view my
behaviour may seem hard and unfair. That is a mere illusion which
disappears as soon as you reflect that all I want is merely not to have
taken from me what is most rightly and incontestably mine, what,
moreover, my whole happiness, my freedom, my learned leisure depend
upon;--a blessing which in this world people like me enjoy so rarely
that it would be almost as unconscientious as cowardly not to defend it
to the uttermost and maintain it by every exertion. You say, perhaps,
that if all your creditors were of this way of thinking, I too should
come badly off. But if all men thought as I do, there would be much more
thinking done, and in that case probably there would be neither
bankruptcies, nor wars, nor gaming tables."[4]

In July 1819, when he was at Heidelberg, the idea occurred to him of
turning university lecturer, and took practical shape the following
summer, when he delivered a course of lectures on philosophy at the
Berlin University. But the experiment was not a success; the course was
not completed through the want of attendance, while Hegel at the same
time and place was lecturing to a crowded and enthusiastic audience.
This failure embittered him, and during the next few years there is
little of any moment in his life to record. There was one incident,
however, to which his detractors would seem to have attached more
importance than it was worth, but which must have been sufficiently
disturbing