Father Johann Rudolf Meyer, Citizen of Aarau: A Memorial

also a few Latin words and linguistic forms, the city school of that time had done the most possible, and for most parents, more than enough. Only wealthier citizens did a little more for their children. For a delusion had gradually spread from the ruling city into most localities of the largest Swiss canton, as if the greater crowd of less respected and less affluent citizens were, as it were, destined by nature for ignorance. But the maternal friend of the aspiring boy was of a different opinion. She allowed him to take advantage of the instruction in geography, which a young clergyman happened to provide to some children of the wealthiest families, and did not bother herself with the turning up of noses by the moneyed aristocracy. Indeed, against all previous custom, she even obtained for him instruction in drawing. In music, it certainly remained at psalm-singing or, rather, psalm-droning. Yet he succeeded—as he sometimes recounted with a smile—in painstakingly trying to fiddle the melody of the Bachofian song: "Care, Father, care for me, etc."