formal instruction little. He continued to be in the main self-taught
and extended his independence in manners and dress perhaps a little
beyond the verge of eccentricity. Meantime matters at home were going
rapidly from bad to worse. His grandfather had died; the inheritance
had been largely consumed in a law-suit. He could not look to his
mother for help and did not look to her for counsel. He suffered from
cold and stretched his credit for rent and food to the breaking point.
But the emptier his stomach the more his head abounded in plans "for
writing books to earn money to buy books." He devised a system of
spelling reform and could submit to his pastor friend at Rehau in 1782
a little sheaf of essays on various aspects of Folly, the student
being now of an age when, like Iago, he was "nothing if not critical."
Later these papers seemed to him little better than school exercises,
but they gave a promise soon to be redeemed in _Greenland Law-Suits_,
his first volume to find a publisher. These satirical sketches,
printed early in 1783, were followed later in that year by another
series, but both had to wait 38 years for a second edition, much
mellowed in revision--not altogether to its profit.

The point of the _Law-Suits_ is directed especially against
theologians and the nobility. Richter's uncompromising fierceness
suggests youthful hunger almost as much as study of Swift. But
Lessing, had he lived to read their stinging epigrams, would have
recognized in Richter the promise of a successor not unworthy to carry
the biting acid of the _Disowning Letter_ over to the hand of Heine.

The _Law-Suits_ proved too bitter for the public taste and it was
seven years before their author found another publisher. Meanwhile
Richter was leading a precarious existence, writing for magazines at
starvation prices, and persevering in an indefatigable search for some