His inner man underwent a corresponding transformation, and, as was so often to be the case with him, it was a woman who was the efficacious instrument of the change.

We have just seen how Frau Boehme seconded her husband's attempts to dissuade him from abandoning his legal studies, but her good offices did not end there.

A woman of cultivated mind and considerable literary attainments, she evidently saw the promise of the raw Frankfort youth, and, with a feminine tact, to which Goethe bore grateful testimony, she set herself to correct his manners and his tastes.

He had brought with him his Frankfort habits of speech, and these under protest he was forced to give up for the modish forms of the smooth-speaking Leipzigers.[20] Before Frau Boehme took him in hand, he assures us, he was not an ill-mannered lad, but she impressed on him the need of cultivating the external graces of social intercourse and even of acquiring a certain skill in the fashionable games of the day--an accomplishment, however, which he never succeeded in attaining.

More important for his future development was Frau Boehme's influence on his literary tastes.