245-7.] The acquaintance to whom Goethe thus refers was the most important person in the circle with which he was mainly associated during his residence in Strassburg.

It was a circle widely different in tastes and ways of thinking from that which he had left at Frankfort.

Boarded in one house, the persons who composed it, about ten in number, daily met at a common table.

Of different ages, and mostly medical students, their talk, as Goethe tells us, mainly turned on their professional studies.

The talk of medical students is not favourable to the cultivation of a mystical piety, and it need not surprise us that a few weeks in this atmosphere were sufficient to give Goethe a growing distaste for those religious sentiments which in his case were only a morbid distortion of his natural instincts.