rd the restrictions and
restraints of his uncle's household regulations; he was eager to be
quit of them, to turn his back upon them; he was anxious to find a
congenial field for his powers-~a field where he could turn his
accomplishments and genius to good account. The only way in which he
could hope to do so at present, at least for some years to come, was by
pursuing a legal career, and law he had no inclination for. He says, in
a letter to Hippel, dated 25th Nov., 1795, "If it depended upon myself
alone I should be a musical composer, and I have hopes that I could do
something great in that line; as for the one I have now chosen, I shall
be a bungler in it as long as I live." He gradually came to live upon a
strained and barely tolerable footing with his uncle, since as he grew
older his tricks and ironical behaviour towards little Otto assumed a
more pronounced character, and stirred up in the old gentleman's mind
feelings of suspicion against his unmanageable nephew. In these
circumstances we may easily discern the germs of a dissatisfaction not
only with his lot in life but also with himself.

Next came the fact of his hopeless love which has just been mentioned.
And another and no less potent cause which tended to deepen and
intensify this spirit of inward dissatisfaction was the delay that
occurred between his passing his entrance examination into the legal
profession in July, 1795, and his appointment to a definite post of
active duty in June, 1796. To be compelled to wear out his independent,
ambitious heart in forced inactivity must have been galling in the
extreme, especially when it is remembered how eagerly he was longing to
shake himself free from the relations amidst which he had grown up, and
his no less earnest desire to get beyond the reach of the passion, or
at any rate the object of the passion, that was gnawing at his very
heart-strings. To an energetic spirit, longing for a useful sphere of
activity, hardly anything can be more fruitful as a source of
unhappiness than enforced idleness. And this sentiment Hoffmann gives
frequent utterance to in his letters at this period.

During these same months he cultivated his mind by the perusal of the
works of such writers as Jean Paul, Schiller, and Goethe, the intellectual
giants upon whom the eyes of Germany were at that time fixed in wonder.
But this course of reading, instead of counteracting, rather encouraged
a native leaning towards poetic dreamin