CHAP. III.

He had somehow got funds which enabled him to buy a little vineyard, prettily situated in the neighbourhood. This he fitted up with every accommodation that could invite the students, and called it Bahrdt's Ruhe. We have already seen the occupations of Dr. B. in this Buen Retiro—Can we call it otium cum dignitate? Alas, no! He had not lived two years here, bustling and toiling for the German Union, sometimes without a bit of bread—when he was sent to prison at Halle, and then to Magdeburg, where he was more than a year in jail. He was set at liberty, and returned to Bahrdt's Ruhe, not, alas, to live at ease, but to lie down on a sick-bed, where, after more than a year's suffering increasing pain, he died on the 23d of April 1793, the most wretched and loathsome victim of unbridled sensuality. The account of his case is written by a friend, a Dr. Jung, who professes to defend his memory and his principles. The medical description melted my heart, and I am certain would make his bitterest enemy weep. Jung repeatedly says, that the case was not venereal—calls it the vineyard disease—the quicksilver disease, (he was dying of an unconquerable salivation,) and yet, through the whole of his narration, relates symptoms and sufferings, which, as a medical man, he could not possibly mean to be taken in any other sense than as effects of pox. He meant to please the enemies of poor Bahrdt, knowing that such a man could have no friends, and being himself ignorant of what friendship or goodness is. The fate of this poor creature affected me more than any thing I have read of a great while. All his open enemies put together have not said so much ill of him as his trusted friend Pott, and another confident, whose name I cannot recollect, who published in his lifetime an anonymous book called Bahrdt with the Iron Brow—and this fellow Jung, under the absurd mask of friendship, exhibited the loathsome carcase for a florin, like a malefactor's at Surgeon's Hall. Such were the fruits