JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER, one of the most famous humorists and essayists of Germany, was born at Wunsiedel, Bavaria, March 21st, 1763. His father was a pastor and teacher who accumulated no property, and his death left the boy Jean Paul to support himself as best he could. Going to Leipsic in the hope of making a living as a tutor, he began in 1783 the literary career which made him a favorite wherever German is read. The eccentricity of his style, which so greatly influenced that of Carlyle, is clearly imitated from Rabelais. In his “Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces,” he often ceases to be intelligible except to those who are experts in his methods as a humorist. As it was a part of his method, however, to become on occasion as profoundly unintelligible as possible, this is not to be wondered at nor seriously complained of. He wrote “Selections from the Papers of the Devil”; “Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces”; “The Invisible Lodge”; “Hesperus”; “Quintus Fixlein”; “Preparatory Course in Æsthetics”; “Levana, or the Theory of Education”; and an unmentionable number of other essays, pamphlets, and literature of all kinds, to the total number of sixty volumes in the Berlin edition of 1879. He died at Bayreuth, November 14th, 1825.