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widely read by women, also exalted the virtue and benefits of friendship. In Zürich a minority of women were valued members of educated circles. Bräker often speaks of them with admiration, but it is noticeable that he writes of their beauty and their refined manners, not of their learning.

As for the suspicion that Bräker was only out for what he could get from his friends, beyond a certain point this is obviously absurd. True, he did have the habit of turning up just when a meal was ready, but there is no evidence that he was not genuinely welcome when he did so. At the very least, his friends would hardly grudge a free meal to someone who had tramped many miles over difficult terrain and often in bad weather, just to have the pleasure of their company. We also know by this time that he in turn was good company, full of admiration for all he saw and heard, modest, well-informed, witty and able to tell a good story against himself (such as the time he cut himself while demonstrating the Prussian arms drill with his host's carving-knife). From some of his friends, notably Füssli, he borrowed money, but he always repaid it when he could and sometimes, when this was impossible, gave a small present instead. Debts between friends did not have the same stigma attached to them as today. Voellmy (v 3 p 25) points out that Dr. Ebel and the poet Frederick Matthison also asked Füssli for money. Also one should remember that most of Bräker's friends lived at a distance that made it impossible for him to visit them more than a few times a year.

There are, however, a few places in Bräker's writing where gratitude does seem to be sliding into flattery and even smarminess. This happens, I think, where he is consciously writing for publication, or, towards the end of his life, hoping for publication as a way out of his desperate financial situation. In his time, however, patronage was a recognised institution by which the poor but talented individual obtained favours from his social superiors, who in return obtained a raised status among their own peers. This was common practice in ancient and medieval times, and persists in a modified form in our own time as "sponsorship". In the absence of better ways of sharing wealth, patronage did at least make sure that some wealthy people would help those less well off, even if it was to enhance their own image rather than to express genuine goodwill.

Bräker, however, sought more from his patrons than material help. We have his own words for it that to him friendship was perhaps the most important thing in life, the one steady support that kept him from being overwhelmed by poverty, debt, hostile neighbours, turbulent family life and, later, illness. For him it was almost equal to God, and Voellmy, in particular, says that his deification of friendship derives from his view of God as Love, and that his veneration of educated people arose out of his early reverence for his father and the various pastors who had taught him as a boy. I am more inclined to think that like many under-educated people even today, he had fallen into the trap of equating knowledge with goodness. Unfortunately even wise people, let alone the merely clever or knowledgeable, are not always "Menschenfreunde".

"Menschenfreund", "friend to humanity", can be literally translated by the Greek-derived English word "philanthropist", but somehow that does not convey the quality of these friends that Bräker so much admired. A "philanthropist" suggests a benefactor in the sense of someone who gives money and organisational talent to found a humanitarian institution, such as a library or a rural industry, not the warmer sense of a Girtanner or Lavater who could always be relied on to give immediate help to an individual in need, not only material help but advice, comfort and moral support. Bräker uses the word so often that at first I thought he had invented it, but in fact it was one of the watchwords of his day. It denoted the ideal man whose natural generosity went beyond his family and neighbours and took no heed of the barriers of class, nation or even religion. Such a man was the exact opposite of the stingy and over-cautious peasant, or the patron who gives only out of pride. Another word that Bräker very often uses in connection with his friends is "noble". They were not, literally, any more noble than himself, they were bankers, clergy, local government officials, bourgeois, but they recognised that wealth and education obliged them to help those who like Bräker were poor and under-privileged. Yet even this did not oblige them to treat him as a friend, but they did so because they recognised his qualities.

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