Wonderful to see how, in such an environment, in the depths of mere toil and tribulation, with a whole breaking world lying on his shoulders, as it were,--he always shows such appetite for a snatch of talk with anybody presumably of sense, and knowledge on something! "This Winter," say the Books, "he had, in vacant intervals, a great deal of communing with the famed of Leipzig University;" this or the other famed Professor,--Winkler, Ernesti, Gottsched again, and others, coming to give account, each for himself, of what he professed to be teaching in the world: "on the Natural Sciences," more especially the Moral; on Libraries, on Rare Books.

Gottsched was able to satisfy the King on one point; namely, That the celebrated passage of St.John's Gospel--"THERE ARE THREE THAT BEAR RECORD--was NOT in the famous Manuscript of the Vienna Library; Gottsched having himself examined that important CODEX, and found in the text nothing of said Passage, but merely, written on the margin, a legible intercalation of it, in Melanchthon's hand.
Luther, in his Version, never had it at all." [_Helden-Geschichte,_ vi.

596.] A Gottsched inclined to the Socinian view?
Not the least consequence to Friedrich or us! Our business is exclusively with Gellert here.
Readers have heard of Gellert; there are, or there were, English Writings about him, LIVES, or I forget what: and in his native Protestant Saxony, among all classes, especially the higher, he had, in those years and onwards to his death, such a popularity and real splendor of authority as no man before or since.

Had risen, against his will in some sort, to be a real Pope, a practical Oracle in those parts.
In his modest bachelor lodging (age of him five-and-forty gone) he has sheaves of Letters daily,--about affairs of the conscience, of the household, of the heart: from some evangelical young lady, for example, Shall I marry HIM, think you, O my Father ?" and perhaps from her Papa, "Shall SHE, think you, O my ditto ?"--Sheaves of Letters: and of oral consulters such crowds, that the poor Oracle was obliged to appoint special hours for that branch of his business.

His class-room (he lectures on MORALS, some THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENT, or such like) is crowded with "blue uniforms" (ingenuous Prussian Officers eager to hear a Gellert) in these Winters.