Note 461 — Chapter XI · [1834.]
Reading edition
This is not quite correctly cited—The passage is in the sixth of the Elegies, “aus Rom,” [vol. I. p. 48. Paris, 1836.]
————So hab’ ich von Herzen, Rothstrumpf immer gehasst und violet-strumpf dazu.
It certainly deserves all the ridicule which Mezzofanti heaps on it, and might well make
————the Muses, on their racks, Scream like the winding of ten thousand jacks.
The allusion to ‘red stocking’ and ‘violet stocking,’ is one of Goethe’s habitual sneers at the Catholic prelacy.