e
lessons of this school he took in with a zest that well illustrates
what he called his "chameleon" nature. Within a year the "little, odd,
coddled boy" who had left his father's house was transformed into a
fashionable Leipzig youth who went even beyond his models. His
home-made suit, which had passed muster in Frankfort, but which
excited ridicule in Leipzig, was exchanged for a costume which went to
the other extreme of dandyism. His inner man underwent a corresponding
transformation, and, as was so often to be the case with him, it was a
woman who was the efficacious instrument of the change. We have just
seen how Frau Boehme seconded her husband's attempts to dissuade him
from abandoning his legal studies, but her good offices did not end
there. A woman of cultivated mind and considerable literary
attainments, she evidently saw the promise of the raw Frankfort youth,
and, with a feminine tact, to which Goethe bore grateful testimony,
she set herself to correct his manners and his tastes. He had brought
with him his Frankfort habits of speech, and these under protest he
was forced to give up for the modish forms of the smooth-speaking
Leipzigers.[20] Before Frau Boehme took him in hand, he assures us, he
was not an ill-mannered lad, but she impressed on him the need of
cultivating the external graces of social intercourse and even of
acquiring a certain skill in the fashionable games of the day--an
accomplishment, however, which he never succeeded in attaining. More
important for his future development was Frau Boehme's influence on his
literary tastes. As was his habit among his friends, he would declaim
to her passages from his favourite poets, and she, "an enemy to all
that was trivial, feeble, and commonplace," would unsparingly point
out their essential inanity. When he ventured to recite his own
poetical attempts, her criticism was equally unsparing. The discipline
was sharp, but for the "coddled" boy, who had been regarded at home
as a youthful prodigy, it was entirely wholesome. Yet, if we may judge
from a description of him some ten months after his arrival in
Leipzig, the chastening does not appear to have lessened his buoyant
self-confidence. The description is from the hand of a comrade of his
own in Frankfort, Horn by name, the son of a former chief magistrate
of the city. Horn, like Goethe, had come to study in Leipzig, and on
his arrival there, 1766, he thus (August, 1766) records his
impressions of