after due consideration the election fell in favour of
Vienna. Accordingly, in March, 1806, at the age of seventeen, young
Overbeck left Lubeck. The home-parting was tender, and might have been
heart-rending could the future have been read. Never were son and
parents to meet again. Frederick in sundry years, when full of honours,
visited Germany, but he seemed to shrink from a return to the scenes of
his youth; change in religion may have made contact painful. Yet we are
told that closest communication was kept up by constant correspondence;
that the father affectionately watched his son's illustrious career and
read with lively satisfaction all announcements in the public journals.
The mother died in 1820, the father a year after: for forty years they
had been lovingly united. I have visited the retired "God's-acre,"
beyond the gates, removed from the noisy traffic of the town, and not
without difficulty discovered the grave of father and mother. So dense
was the overgrowth of years, that not a letter on the massive stone
could be seen; but the old man of the place, tearing away the thick
mantle of ivy, revealed the words, "Here rest in God Elizabeth Overbeck,
and Christian Adolph Overbeck, Burgomaster."

On reaching Vienna, the super-sensuous painter did not find a bed of
roses: his tastes were fastidious, his habits exclusive, his aspirations
impracticable. Of course his art remained as yet unremunerative; thus
his means were scanty, and the friends he might have hoped to make
turned out enemies. And it cannot be denied that the state of things in
Vienna was enough to discourage and disgust an earnest, truth-seeking
student. The Academy into which the Christian artist entered was under
the direction of Friedrich Fuger, a painter of the French type, not
without renown, but given over to the service of Jupiter, Prometheus,
and Venus, and when he chanced to turn to sacred subjects, such as _The
Death of Abel_ and _The Reading Magdalen_, affectation and empty
pretence were his resource. I have seldom seen works more contemptible.
Overbeck was in despair, and wrote to a friend that he had fallen among
a vulgar set, that every better feeling, every noble thought, was
suppressed within the Academy, and that, losing all faith in humanity
and in art, he turned inwardly on himself. This transcendental strain, I
cannot but think, came in some measure from the conceit incident to
youth; self-complaisancy was certainly a habit of