With this
scandalous person and with play-actors, more than probably of both sexes,
did the young Lessing share a Christmas cake sent him by his mother. Such
news was not long in reaching Camenz, and we can easily fancy how tragic
it seemed in the little parsonage there, to what cabinet councils it gave
rise in the paternal study, to what ominous shaking of the clerical wig
in that domestic Olympus. A pious fraud is practised on the boy, who
hurries home thinly clad through the winter weather, his ill-eaten
Christmas cake wringing him with remorseful indigestion, to receive the
last blessing, if such a prodigal might hope for it, of a broken-hearted
mother. He finds the good dame in excellent health, and softened toward
him by a cold he has taken on his pious journey. He remains at home
several months, now writing Anacreontics of such warmth that his sister
(as volunteer representative of the common hangman) burns them in the
family stove; now composing sermons to convince his mother that "he could
be a preacher any day,"--a theory of that sacred office unhappily not yet
extinct. At Easter, 1747, he gets back to Leipzig again, with some scant
supply of money in his pocket, but is obliged to make his escape thence
between two days somewhere toward the middle of the next year, leaving
behind him some histrionic debts (chiefly, we fear, of a certain
Mademoiselle Lorenz) for which he had confidingly made himself security.
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