[Side-note: Frankfort Characters - Hofrath Huisgen.]
HOFRATH HUISGEN, not born in Frankfort, of the reformed[7] religion, and therefore incapable of public office, including the profession of advocate, which, however, because much confidence was placed in him as an excellent jurist, he managed to exercise quietly, both in the Frankfort and the imperial courts, under assumed signatures, was already sixty years old when I took writing lessons with his son, and so came into his house. His figure was tall without being thin, and broad without corpulency. You could not look, for the first time, on his face, which was not only disfigured by smallpox, but deprived of an eye, without apprehension. He always wore on his bald head a perfectly white bell-shaped cap, tied at the top with a ribbon. His morning-gowns, of calamanco or damask, were always very clean. He dwelt in a very cheerful suite, of rooms on the ground-floor by the _Allée_, and the neatness of everything about him corresponded with this cheerfulness. The perfect arrangement of his papers, books, and maps, produced a favourable impression. His son Heinrich Sebastian, afterwards known by various writings on Art, gave little promise in his youth. Good-natured but dull, not rude but blunt, and without any special liking for instruction, he rather sought to avoid the presence of his father, as he could get all he wanted from his mother. I, on the other hand, grew more and more intimate with the old man, the more I knew of him. As he attended only to important cases, he had time enough to occupy and amuse himself in another manner. I had not long frequented his house, and heard his doctrines, than I could well perceive that he stood in opposition to God and the world. One of his favourite books was _Agrippa de Vanitate Scientiarum_, which he especially commended to me, and so set my young brains in a considerable whirl for a long time. In the happiness of youth I was inclined to a sort of optimism, and had again pretty well reconciled myself with God or the Gods; for the experience of a series of years had taught me that there was much to counterbalance evil, that one can well recover from misfortune, and that one may be saved from dangers and need not always break one's neck. I looked with tolerance, too, on what men did and pursued, and found many things worthy of praise which my old gentleman could not by any means abide. Indeed, once when he had sketched the world to me, rather from the distorted side, I observed from his appearance that he meant to close the game with an important trump-card. He shut tight his blind left eye, as he was wont to do in such cases, looked sharp out of the other, and said in a nasal voice, "Even in God I discover defects."