romance called "Melmoth the Wanderer," which used to alarm us
boys thirty years ago; eyes of an individual who had made a bargain with
a Certain Person, and at an extreme old age retained these eyes in their
awful splendour. I fancy Goethe must have been still more handsome as an
old man than even in the days of his youth. His voice was very rich and
sweet. He asked me questions about myself, which I answered as best I
could. I recollect I was at first astonished, and then somewhat
relieved, when I found he spoke French with not a good accent.

_Vidi tantum._ I saw him but three times. Once walking in the garden of
his house in the _Frauenplan_; once going to step into his chariot on a
sunshiny day, wearing a cap and a cloak with a red collar. He was
caressing at the time a beautiful little golden-haired granddaughter,
over whose sweet fair face the earth has long since closed, too.

Any of us who had books or magazines from England sent them to him, and
he examined them eagerly. _Fraser's Magazine_ had recently come out, and
I remember he was interested in those admirable outline portraits which
appeared for a while in its pages. But there was one, a very ghastly
caricature of Mr. Rogers, which, as Madame de Goethe told me, he shut up
and put away from him angrily. "They would make me look like that," he
said; though, in truth, I can fancy nothing more serene, majestic, and
_healthy_-looking than the grand old Goethe.

Though his sun was setting, the sky round about was calm and bright, and
that little Weimar illumined by it. In every one of those kind salons
the talk was still of Art and Letters. The theatre, though possessing no
extraordinary actors, was still connected with a noble intelligence and
order. The actors read books and were men of letters and gentlemen,
holding a not unkindly relationship with the _Adel_. At Court the
conversation was exceedingly friendly, simple, and polished.... In the
respect paid by this court to the Patriarch of Letters, there was
something ennobling, I think, alike to the subject and the sovereign.
With a five-and-twenty years' experience since those happy days of which
I write, and an acquaintance with an immense variety of human kind, I
think I have never seen a society more simple, charitable, courteous,
gentlemanlike, than that of the dear little Saxon city where the good
Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie buried.

LITTLE BILLEE
[Sidenote: _W.M. Thackeray_]

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