carried away from his room an old chest, and removed his shirts and stockings from the bureau for the laundress, he was inconsolable when he returned, declaring that he had lost his whole Assyrian History, and that all his proofs of the immortality of the soul, which he had arranged so systematically in the drawers, were gone to the wash![1]
Among the originals whom I learned to know in Leyden belongs Mynheer van Bissen, a cousin of Van Moeulen, who introduced him to me. He was professor of theology at the university, and I attended his lectures on the Canticles of Solomon and the Apocalypse of St. John. He was a fine, flourishing, florid man, perhaps of fifty-five, and in his chair was very staid and serious. But once when I called on him and found no one in his study, I saw through the half-opened door of a side-room a very strange sight. This cabinet was furnished in a half-Chinese, half-Pompadour style, with shot-gold[2] damask hangings on the wall, on the ground the most costly Persian carpet,
- ↑ Few things which were in the list of scholastic absurdities escaped Heine, and it is not remarkable that he should here satirise the Mnemonic system, which teaches us to remember anything by first remembering something else, instead of directly cultivating memory itself.
- ↑ Goldig-schillernde Damasttapeten. Schillern is to shine while changing colour. Schiller the poet is said to derive his name from a wine so called from its gleam.
