This interesting but neglected eighteenth-century novel, by von Loen - a successful merchant and a great-uncle of Goethe - comes at the end of the tradition in which members of upper-class society narrate their life-stories; the author uses the device to show the education of a prince to bring about a paragon of nobility. As a whole, it provides a revealing mirror of the attitudes of the German enlightenment. First English translation. JOHN RUSSELL is Professor Emeritus of German at SUNY Stony Brook.