Such humorous acts of daring, brought on the theatre with wit and sense, are of the greatest effect.  They are distinguished from intrigue, inasmuch as they are momentary, and that their aim, whenever they are to have one, must not be remote.  Beaumarchais has seized their full value, and the effects of his “Figaro” spring pre-eminently from this.  Whereas such good-humored roguish and half-knavish pranks are practised with personal risk for noble ends, the situations which arise from them are aesthetically and morally considered of the greatest value for the theatre; as, for instance, the opera of “The Water-Carrier” treats perhaps the happiest subject which we have ever yet seen upon the stage.

To enliven the extreme tedium of daily life, I played off numberless tricks of the sort, partly without any aim at all, partly in the service of my friends, whom I liked to please.  For myself, I could not say that I had once acted in this designedly, nor did I ever happen to consider a feat of the kind as a subject for art.  Had I, however, seized upon and elaborated such materials, which were so close at hand, my earliest labors would have been more cheerful and available.  Some incidents of this kind occur indeed later, but isolated and without design.  For since the heart always lies nearer to us than the head, and gives us trouble, whereas the latter knows how to set matters to rights, the affairs of the heart had always appeared to me as the most important.  I was never weary of reflecting upon the transient nature of attachments, the mutability of human character, moral sensuality, and all the heights and depths, the combination of which in our nature may be considered as the riddle of human life.  Here, too, I sought to get rid of that which troubled me, in a song, an epigram, in some kind of rhyme; which, since they referred to the most private feelings and the most peculiar circumstances, could scarcely interest any one but myself.

In the mean time, my external position had very much changed after the lapse of a short time.  Madame Boehme, after a long and melancholy illness, had at last died:  she had latterly ceased to admit me to her presence.  Her husband could not be very much satisfied with me:  I seemed to him not sufficiently industrious, and too frivolous.  He especially took it very ill of me, when it was told him, that at the lectures on German Public Law, instead of taking proper notes, I had been drawing on the margin of my note-book the personages presented to our notice in them, such as the President of the Chamber, the Moderators and Assessors, in strange wigs; and by this drollery had disturbed my attentive neighbors and set them laughing.  After the loss of his wife he lived still more retired than before, and at last I shunned him in order to avoid his reproaches.  But it was peculiarly unfortunate that Gellert would not use the power which he might have exercised over us.  Indeed, he had not time to play the father-confessor,