Horn, like Goethe, had come to study in Leipzig, and on his arrival there, 1766, he thus (August, 1766) records his impressions of Goethe to a common friend: "If you only saw him, you would be either furious with rage or burst with laughing.

It is beyond me to understand how anyone can change so quickly.

Besides being arrogant, he is also a dandy, and his clothes, though fine, are in such ridiculous taste that they attract the attention of the whole university.[21] But he does not mind that a bit, and it is useless to tell him of his follies....

He has acquired a gait which is simply intolerable.

Could you only see him!" Such was Horn's first impression of his former comrade, but it is right to say that a few months later he could tell the same correspondent that they had not lost a friend in Goethe, who had still the same good heart and was as much a philosopher and a moralist as ever.
[Footnote 19: Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.] [Footnote 20: In point of fact Goethe retained to the end the intonation and the idioms of his native speech.] [Footnote 21: In his Autobiography Goethe states as the reason for his casting off the home-made suit he had brought with him from Frankfort, that a person entering the Leipzig theatre in similar costume excited the ridicule of the audience.] In his second letter Horn gives a singular reason for the preposterous airs which Goethe had lately put on.