GOLTZ, Bogumil (1801-1870), humorist and satirist, was born of a German family settled at Warsaw, March 20, 1801. At the age of seven he was taken by some friends to Königsberg, and after studying at the gymnasium was placed under the care of a country clergyman near Marienwerder. He next went to the gymnasium of Marienwerder, and finally returned to Königsberg. In 1817 he began to learn practical farming on an estate near Thorn; but the strong desire which he felt for scientific culture led him, five years later, to the university of Breslau. There he at first entered upon the study of theology, but he did not pursue it, selecting instead philosophy and philology. The next year he bought an estate near Thorn, married the daughter of a Prussian officer, and applied himself to the duties of a farmer. He did not succeed; and after other equally unsuccessful experiments in the same line in Poland and Prussia, he retired in 1830 to the small town of Gollub, and devoted himself to literary studies. Sixteen years of meditative seclusion passed away; and then, having taken up his abode at Thorn, he gave to the world the first fruits of his studies and reflexions in the charming poetic Buch der Kindheit (1847), in which he delineates the incidents and impressions of his own childhood with a tender feeling like that of Jean Paul. The dates which he gives in this narrative are inconsistent with those which he furnished for the memoir in Brockhaus’s Conversations- Lexikon ; and a chronological difficulty is thus created which perhaps it may not be possible to solve....

GOLTZIUS, Hendrik (1558-1617), a Dutch painter and engraver, was born in 1558 at Mülebrecht, in the duchy of Juliers. After studying painting on glass for some years under his father, he was taught the use of the burin by Dirk Volkertsz Coornlert, a Dutch engraver of mediocre attainment, whom he soon surpassed, but who retained his services for his own advantage. He was also employed by Philip Galle to engrave a set of prints of the history of Lucretia. At the age of twenty-one he married a widow somewhat advanced in years, whose money enabled him to establish at Haarlem an independent business; but his unpleasant relations with her so affected his health that he found it advisable in 1590 to make a tour through Germany to Italy, where he acquired an intense admiration for the works of Michelangelo, which led him to surpass that master in the grotesqueness and extravagance of his designs. He returned to Haarlem considerably improved in health, and laboured there at his art till his death, January 1, 1617. Goltzius ought not to be judged chiefly by the works he valued most, his eccentric imitations of Michelangelo. His portraits, though mostly miniatures, are master-pieces of their kind, both on account of their exquisite finish, and as fine studies of individual character. Of his larger heads, the life-size portrait of himself is probably the most striking example. His “master-pieces,” so called from their being attempts to imitate the style of the old masters, have perhaps been overpraised. In his command of the burin Goltzius is not surpassed even by Dürer; but his technical skill is often unequally aided by higher artistic qualities. Even, however, his eccentricities and extravagances are greatly counterbalanced by the beauty and freedom of his execution. He ...