Note 651 — Chapter III · GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

He describes himself in a letter to Reichardt, of June 1777 (v. 248), as spending the livelong day in reading “the Greek Testament, some classic, or Shakespeare.” Fifteen years earlier, in one of the maddest-looking of his tract-groups (Essais à Mosaïque, vol. ii.), written in French and giving itself out as written in England, “at Bedlam,” “Tyburn Road,” &c., he had pronounced Falstaff “unique”: and his quotations from Hamlet, at a time when the future author of Wilhelm Meister was scarcely breeched, are frequent.