OCTOBER 75 



age, to seek his fortunes in the world. As he says himself : 

 ' At certain epochs children part from parents, servants 

 from masters, proteges from their patrons ; and whether 

 it' succeed or not, such an attempt to stand on one's own 

 feet, to make one's self independent, to live for one's self, 

 is always in accordance with the will of Nature.' 



I am so fond of Goethe's sayings that they stick 

 somehow in my mind, in spite of my bad memory. He 

 says somewhere so truly, and it refers to this entrance 

 into life that all have to face : ' Every man has his decoy, 

 and every man is led or misled in a way peculiar to 

 himself.' How frequently Goethe's sayings remind one 

 of Lord John Russell's apt definition of a proverb, 

 ' One man's wit and all men's wisdom ' ! Goethe's house 

 in the Hirschgraben is now a museum, bought by the 

 Goethe Society, whose headquarters are at Weimar, and 

 restored by them with reverent care. Every effort is 

 made to preserve it and what it contains from decay. 

 Such guardians are necessary ; they hold the hand of the 

 destroyer and arrest decay, keeping for posterity what we 

 ourselves highly value. The old house where Luther rested 

 for the night on his way to the Diet of Worms was being 

 levelled to the ground this summer before my eyes, to 

 make room for a handsome entrance into the courtyard 

 of a large white stucco house. So incongruous was 

 this building to the old sixteenth-century street that 

 had I seen it suddenly I should have said it was a 

 residence, not in Frankfort, but in the Quartier St. 

 Germain in Paris. I honour all societies that save us 

 from this wholesale destruction of the past. In the 

 Goethe house-museum there were some of Goethe's 

 drawings which made me sympathise more than I had 

 ever done before with Lewes's somewhat bitter reproaches 

 about the time Goethe wasted on drawing. Lewes says : 

 ' All his study and all his practice were vain ; he never 



