If I cannot so arrange it that we
(meaning the _quintuple alliance_[12]) shall mess together, I would
engage at the _table d'hote_ of the inn; for I had rather fast than
eat without company, large, or else particularly good.

[Footnote 12: Who the other three were is nowhere
particularly mentioned.]

'I write all this to you, my dearest friend, to forewarn you of my
silly tastes; and, at all events, that I may put it in your power to
take some preparatory steps, in one place or another, for my
settlement. My demands are, in truth, confoundedly naive, but your
goodness has spoiled me.

'The first part of the _Thalia_ must already be in your possession;
the doom of _Carlos_ will ere now be pronounced. Yet I will take it
from you orally. Had we five not been acquainted, who knows but we
might have become so on occasion of this very _Carlos_?'

Schiller went accordingly to Leipzig; though whether Huber received
him, or he found his humble necessaries elsewhere, we have not
learned. He arrived in the end of March 1785, after eighteen months'
residence at Mannheim. The reception he met with, his amusements,
occupations, and prospects are described in a letter to the Kammerrath
Schwann, a bookseller at Mannheim, alluded to above. Except Dalberg,
Schwann had been his earliest friend; he was now endeared to him by
subsequent familiarity, not of letters and writing, but of daily
intercourse; and what was more than all, by the circumstance that
_Laura_ was his daughter. The letter, it will be seen, was written
with a weightier object than the pleasure of describing Leipzig: it is
dated 24th April 1785.

'You have an indubitable right to be angry at my long silence; yet I
know your goodness too well to be in doubt that you will pardon me.

'When a man, unskilled as I am in the busy world, visits Leipzig for
the first time, during the Fair, it is, if not excusable, at least
intelligible, that among the multitude of strange things running
through his head, he should for a few days lose recollection of
himself. Such, my dearest friend, has till today been nearly my case;
and even now I have to steal from many avocations the pleasing moments
which, in idea, I mean to spend with you at Mannheim.

'Our journey hither, of which Herr Goetz will give you a circumstantial
description, was the most dismal you can well imagine; Bog, Snow and
Rain were the three wicked foes that by turns assailed us; and though
we used an addi