Goethe to a common friend: "If you only saw him, you
would be either furious with rage or burst with laughing. It is beyond
me to understand how anyone can change so quickly. Besides being
arrogant, he is also a dandy, and his clothes, though fine, are in
such ridiculous taste that they attract the attention of the whole
university.[21] But he does not mind that a bit, and it is useless to
tell him of his follies.... He has acquired a gait which is simply
intolerable. Could you only see him!" Such was Horn's first impression
of his former comrade, but it is right to say that a few months later
he could tell the same correspondent that they had not lost a friend
in Goethe, who had still the same good heart and was as much a
philosopher and a moralist as ever.

[Footnote 19:

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.]

[Footnote 20: In point of fact Goethe retained to the end the
intonation and the idioms of his native speech.]

[Footnote 21: In his Autobiography Goethe states as the reason for his
casting off the home-made suit he had brought with him from Frankfort,
that a person entering the Leipzig theatre in similar costume excited
the ridicule of the audience.]

In his second letter Horn gives a singular reason for the preposterous
airs which Goethe had lately put on. Goethe, wrote Horn, had fallen in
love with a girl "beneath him in rank," and his antics were assumed to
disguise the fact from his friends who might report it to his father.
Goethe's relations to this girl were to be his liveliest experience in
Leipzig, and an experience frequently to be repeated at different
periods of his life. Like his other adventures of the same nature, it
was to supply him with a fund of emotions and reflections which at a
future day were to serve him as literary capital. The tale of his
passion, if passion it was, is, therefore, an essential part of his
biography, both as a man and a literary artist.

The girl in question was Kaethchen (or, as Goethe calls her in his
Autobiography, Aennchen) Schoenkopf, the daughter of a wineseller and
lodging-house keeper in Leipzig, whose wife, we are informed, belonged
to a "patrician" family in Frankfort. As described by Horn, she was
"well-grown though not tall, with a round, pleasant face, though not
particularly pretty, and with an open, gentle, and engaging air"; and
in a letter to his sister Goethe gives the further information