o go to the theatre,
and he made such rapid progress that he was soon studying the dramatic
unities as expounded by Corneille and actually trying to write a
French play. Withal he was left much to himself, so that he had time
to explore Frankfurt to his heart's content.

[Illustration: JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE _From the painting by C.
Jaeger_]

He was much in contact with people of the humbler sort and learned to
like their racy dialect. He penetrated into the ghetto and learned the
jargon of the Jews. He even attacked biblical Hebrew, being led
thereto by his great love of the Old Testament.

It was his boyish ambition to become a great poet. His favorite
amusement was a puppet-show, for which he invented elaborate plays.
From his tenth year on he wrote a great deal of verse, early acquiring
technical facility and local renown and coming to regard himself as a
"thunderer." He attempted a polyglot novel, also a biblical tale on
the subject of Joseph, which he destroyed on observing that the hero
did nothing but pray and weep. When he was ready for the university he
wished to go to Goettingen to study the old humanities, but his father
was bent on making a lawyer of him. So it came about that some ten
years of his early life were devoted, first as a student and then as a
practitioner, to a reluctant and half-hearted grapple with the
intricacies of Holy Roman law.

At the age of sixteen Goethe entered the University of Leipzig, where
he remained about three years. The law lectures bored him and he soon
ceased to attend them. The other studies that he took up, especially
logic and philosophy, seemed to him arid and unprofitable--mere
conventional verbiage without any bed-rock of real knowledge. So he
presently fell into that mood of disgust with academic learning which
was afterwards to form the keynote of _Faust_. Outside the university
he found congenial work in Oeser's drawing-school. Oeser was an artist
of no great power with the brush, but a genial man, a friend of
Winckelmann, and an enthusiast for Greek art. Goethe learned to admire
and love him, and from this time on, for some twenty years, his
constant need of artistic expression found hardly less satisfaction in
drawing from nature than in poetry.

His poetic ambition received little encouragement in university
circles. Those to whom he read his ambitious verses made light of
them. The venerated Gellert, himself a poet of repute, advised the lad
to cult