We learn little of his career there,
except that Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were already his favorite
authors, that he once characteristically distinguished himself by a
courageous truthfulness, and that he wrote a Latin poem on the valor of
the Saxon soldiers, which his father very sensibly advised him to
shorten. In 1750, four years after leaving the school, he writes to his
father: "I believed even when I was at Meissen that one must learn much
there which he cannot make the least use of in real life (_der Welt_),
and I now [after trying Leipzig and Wittenberg] see it all the more
clearly,"--a melancholy observation which many other young men have made
under similar circumstances. Sent to Leipzig in his seventeenth year, he
finds himself an awkward, ungainly lad, and sets diligently to perfecting
himself in the somewhat unscholastic accomplishments of riding, dancing,
and fencing. He also sedulously frequents the theatre, and wrote a play,
"The Young Scholar," which attained the honor of representation.
Meanwhile his most intimate companion was a younger brother of his
old tutor Mylius, a young man of more than questionable morals,
and who had even written a satire on the elders of Camenz, for
which--over-confidently trusting himself in the outraged city--he had
been fined and imprisoned; so little could the German Muse, celebrated by
Klopstock for her swiftness of foot, protect her son.
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