ughgut; a young person of quality
(_von Adel_), from the interior parts of England. He stood connected, by
blood and hospitality, with the Counts von Zahdarm, in this quarter of
Germany; to which noble Family I likewise was, by his means, with all
friendliness, brought near. Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably
ill-cultivated; with considerable humor of character: and, bating his
total ignorance, for he knew nothing except Boxing and a little Grammar,
showed less of that aristocratic impassivity, and silent fury, than for
most part belongs to Travellers of his nation. To him I owe my first
practical knowledge of the English and their ways; perhaps also
something of the partiality with which I have ever since regarded that
singular people. Towgood was not without an eye, could he have come at
any light. Invited doubtless by the presence of the Zahdarm Family,
he had travelled hither, in the almost frantic hope of perfecting his
studies; he, whose studies had as yet been those of infancy, hither to
a University where so much as the notion of perfection, not to say the
effort after it, no longer existed! Often we would condole over the hard
destiny of the Young in this era: how, after all our toil, we were to be
turned out into the world, with beards on our chins indeed, but with few
other attributes of manhood; no existing thing that we were trained to
Act on, nothing that we could so much as Believe. 'How has our head on
the outside a polished Hat,' would Towgood exclaim, 'and in the inside
Vacancy, or a froth of Vocables and Attorney-Logic! At a small cost men
are educated to make leather into shoes; but at a great cost, what am
I educated to make? By Heaven, Brother! what I have already eaten
and worn, as I came thus far, would endow a considerable Hospital of
Incurables.'--'Man, indeed,' I would answer, 'has a Digestive Faculty,
which must be kept working, were it even partly by stealth. But as for
our Miseducation, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet ours, in
trampling on thistles because they have yielded us no figs. _Frisch
zu, Bruder_! Here are Books, and we have brains to read them; here is
a whole Earth and a whole Heaven, and we have eyes to look on them:
_Frisch zu_!'

"Often also our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even fire.
We looked out on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where all at
once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quartered: motley, not
unterrific was the aspect; but