ed by educating and elevating the people, to make
them comprehend the moral and domestic significance of marriage.

And how was it with the heart of lovers? The following example will
show how true love germinated amidst all the various family interests.

Felix Platter, the son of Thomas Platter, burgher, printer,
schoolmaster, and householder at Basle, was born in 1536. His father by
unwearied activity had risen from the greatest poverty, and had up to
an advanced age to struggle with anxieties for his maintenance, and
with pecuniary embarrassments, in consequence of the constant extension
of his business. This hard battle with life had exercised its usual
influence on his mind; he had a restless spirit of enterprise, which
sometimes hindered him from steadily pursuing a plan; he had no real
self-confidence, was easily perplexed, irritable, and morose. His son
Felix, the only child by his first marriage, had on the contrary
inherited the joyous disposition of his single-minded mother; he was a
jolly warm-hearted lad, rather vain, passionately fond of music and
dancing, at the same time clever, open and ingenuous. He was still
almost a boy when his father sent him from Basle to the celebrated
medical college of the university of Montpellier. Felix having acquired
there, not only everything that medical science then offered, but all
kinds of French refinements, returned to the simple burgher life of his
native town: at the age of one-and-twenty he took his degree as doctor,
and married happily a maiden about whom he had been teased when a
child. He gained a great reputation, became Professor of the
university, and a man of opulence and consideration, and died at an
advanced age. He was of the greatest service to the city of Basle, by
his self-sacrificing activity at the time of the plague, and also to
the medical faculty of his university by his learning; and he was often
consulted as a physician of renown by persons of princely rank both in
Germany and France. He laid out a botanic garden at Basle, and
possessed a cabinet of physical science worthy of being shown for
money. Like his father, he wrote an account of part of his life: the
following fragment is taken from a printed edition of the manuscript,
entitled 'Thomas and Felix Platter, two Autobiographies, by Dr. D. A.
Fechter, Basle, 1840.'

The narrative begins with that day on which the young Felix returns
with all the self-confidence of a scholar to his native