dded a weak and ailing condition of body, which made her
for the most part a confirmed invalid. When, in 1782, the elder
Hoffmann was promoted to the dignity of judge and transferred to a
criminal court at Insterburg (Prussia), Ernst was taken into the house
of his maternal grandmother; and his father appears never to have
troubled himself further either about him or his elder brother, who
afterwards took to evil ways. The brothers in all probability never met
again, though an unfinished letter, dated 10th July, 1817, found
amongst Hoffmann's papers after his death, was evidently written to his
brother in reply to one received from him requesting pecuniary
assistance.

In his grandmother's house young Hoffmann spent his boyhood and youth.
The members of the household were four, the grandmother, her son, her
two daughters, of whom one was the boy's invalid mother. The old lady,
owing to her great age, was also virtually an invalid; so that both she
and her daughter scarcely ever left their room, and hence their
influence upon young Ernst's education and training was practically
nil. His uncle, however, after an abortive attempt to follow the law,
had settled down to a quiet vegetative sort of existence, which he
regulated strictly according to fixed rules and methodical procedure;
and these he imposed more or less upon the household. Justizrath Otto
(or Ottchen, as his mother continued to call him to her life's end),
though acting as a dead weight upon his high-spirited, quick-witted
nephew's intellectual development, by his efforts to mould him to his
own course of life and his own unpliant habits of thought, nevertheless
planted certain seeds in the boy's mind which proved of permanent
service to him throughout all his subsequent career. To this precise
and order-loving uncle he owed his first thorough grounding in the
elements of music, and also his persevering industry and sense of
method and precision. As uncle and nephew shared the same sitting-room
and the same sleeping-chamber, and as the former would never suffer any
departure from the established routine of things, the boy Ernst began
not only to look forward to the one afternoon a week when Otto went out
to make his calls, but also to study narrowly his uncle's habits, and
to play upon his weaknesses and turn them to his own advantage, so that
by the time he was twelve years old he was quite an adept at mystifying
the staid old gentleman. His aunt, an unmarrie