to improve his temper, or fall upon him with a
strap that hung handy behind the kitchen-door. Then the mother, when the
father was out of the way, would take the lad and cry over him, and
coddle him, and undo the discipline.

The best treatment for tantrums is--nothing. The more you let a nervous,
impressionable child alone, the better.

When the lad was fourteen years old, we find him setting type in his
father's printery. He was working on a book called, "The World's
Celebrities," and his share of the work dealt with Jean Paul Richter. He
grew interested in the copy and stopped setting type and read ahead, as
printers sometimes will. The more he read, the more he was fascinated.
He fell under the spell of Jean Paul the Only.

Jean Paul, inspired by Jean Jacques, was the inspirer of the whole brood
of young writers of his time. To him they looked as to a Deliverer.
Jean Paul the Only! The largest, gentlest, most generous heart in all
literature! The peculiar mark of Richter's style is analogy and
comparison; everything he saw reminded him of something else, and then
he tells you of things of which both remind him. He leads and lures you
on, and takes you far from home, but always brings you safely back. Yet
comparison proves us false when we deal with Richter himself. He stands
alone, like Adam's recollection of his fall, which according to Jean
Paul was the one sweet, unforgetable thing in all the life of the First
Citizen of his time.

Jean Paul seems to have combined in that mighty brain all feminine as
well as masculine attributes. The soul in which the feminine does not
mingle is ripe for wrong, strife and unreason. "It was mother-love,
carried one step further, that enabled the Savior to embrace a world,"
says Carlyle.

The sweep of tender emotion that murmurs and rustles through the writing
of Jean Paul is like the echo of a lullaby heard in a dream. Perhaps it
came from that long partnership when mother and son held the siege
against poverty, and the kitchen-table served them as a writing-desk,
and the patient old mother was his sole reviewer, critic, reader and
public.

For shams, hypocrisy and pretense Jean Paul had a cyclone of sarcasm,
and the blows he struck were such as only a son of Anak could give; but
in his heart there was no hate. He could despise a man's bad habits and
still love the man behind the veneer of folly. So his arms seem ever
extended, welcoming the wanderer home.

Dear Jean Pau