76 MORE POT-POURRI 



attained even the excellence of an amateur. To think 

 of a Goethe thus obstinately cultivating a branch of art 

 for which he had no talent makes us look with kinder 

 appreciation on the spectacle, so frequently presented, of 

 really able men obstinately devoting themselves to pro- 

 duce poetry no cultivated man can read ; men whose 

 culture and insight are insufficient to make them perceive 

 in themselves the difference between aspiration and in- 

 spiration.' 



I also went alone to the suburb of Sachsenhausen to 

 see the Staedel Art Institute. Frederick Staedel, in 1816, 

 bequeathed his pictures and engravings and 100,000/. to 

 his native town. This formed the nucleus of the present 

 gallery. Many pictures have been added since his death, 

 and in many ways the collection is an interesting one. 

 I stood long before a picture which the inscription on 

 the frame told me had been presented by a Baroness 

 Rothschild. Having no catalogue, and feeling shy about 

 asking in German, I neither knew nor guessed what it 

 was or why it was there. It powerfully arrested my atten- 

 tion a life-sized picture of a man of about forty, sitting 

 in a gray, flowing overcoat, on gray stones in the gray 

 Campagna of Rome. Afterwards I was told that it was 

 the famous picture of Goethe by Johann Friedrich 

 Tischbein. This painter lived from 1750 to 1812 that is 

 to say, only a part of the life of Goethe, who was born a 

 year before Tischbein and died in 1832. He therefore 

 was thirty-seven when he wrote in the letters from Italy, 

 December 1786, as follows : ' Latterly I have often ob- 

 served Tischbein attentively regarding me ; and now it 

 appears he has long cherished the idea of painting my 

 portrait. His design is already settled and the canvas 

 stretched. I am to be drawn the size of life, enveloped 

 in a white mantle, and sitting on a fallen obelisk, viewing 

 the ruins of the Campagna di Roma, which are to fill up 



