58
RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
anonymous sailors on the transport vessel that took him to Nova
Scotia. His social life in Halifax appears to have been strictly
limited to his friends in the camp, with the exception of the
“Brittin” mentioned in the previously quoted poem. He also became
acquainted with the Indians near Halifax, but not to any great
degree. On his way back to Europe the ships lay at anchor off
Deal, but it can be assumed that he did not manage to go on land.
H
Upon Seume’s return to Germany there follows a long silence
about meetings with Englishmen until the year 1786. In a letter
to his boyhood friend, Johann Gottlob Korbinsky, from Emden
(where he had been forced to do garrison duty with the Prussians),
dated October 13, he writes Vaingloriously, “I am considered a
strong Englishman, and native Britons have praised the purity of
my English verses” (PR, p. 53). In the light of this remark it
can be assumed that Seume met several Englishmen in Emden,
and perhaps even mixed socially with them. However, no trace or
mention of these occur in his writings. This silence about English-
men continues through his release from the Prussians, his fouι∙
years in Leipzig where in 1792 he received the M.A. degree in
philology (classical languages), his stay in Poland and later in
Grimma.
Finally, in the fall of 1801, Seume set out on foot from Saxony
to Sicily. From Grimma to Weimar and Jena he traveled in the
company of Henry Crabb Robinson (cf. the third article in note 2
of this paper which discusses their encounter). While walking
through Bohemia and Austria to Vienna in the company of Schnorr,
he met no Englishmen. But after his arrival in Italy he apparently
encountered quite a number of Britons, for his Spaziergang is full
of little incidents involving Englishmen and anecdotes concerning
the English in Italy. As was to be expected, in 1802, shortly after
the Peace of Amiens and before the outbreak of renewed hostilities,
quite a few Britons traveled on the continent. Most of those whom
he met he found in hotels or on public vehicles. Perhaps he would
have come across his first Englishman in Venice, if the hotel “The
Queen of England” had not been full, forcing him to seek lodgings
in a more modest inn (W, I, 239). In Naples, at last, he lived in a
boarding house run by a Frenchwoman. “The company,” he writes,
“consists mostly of foreigners, Englishmen, Germans, and French-
men; the latter are now in the majority here” (W, I, 313). Yet he
apparently did not make friends with any of them.