home and abroad. He carried a corresponding feeling into his general intercourse with the world. It would have hurt his pride and self-respect to have been over-rated; but he professed to be neither saint nor philosopher enough to be satisfied with the consciousness of his own merits, if it was not reflected in the opinion of those around him. In many departments of knowledge his supremacy was in his maturer age so well known by himself, that he bore with little equanimity the presumption of ignorant opponents; yet he was modest, and as ready to admit the claims of others as to enforce his own. His defect was but a pardonable want of

stoicism.

After a residence of less than two years Niebuhr left Kiel early in 1786 to accept the office of private secretary to Schimmelmann, the Minister of Finance at Copenhagen. His industry and talents for business soon won the confidence of his principal, whom he regarded in turn with respect and affection; but his shyness and dislike to general society rendered his residence in the minister's family irksome, and produced an unpleasant state of feeling between him and the Countess Schimmelmann, who naturally expected her young guest to take a part in the social intercourse of her house. He found time, notwithstanding every interruption, to continue his studies, and after some months accepted an appointment in the Royal Library, which enabled him to pursue them with greater facility. He had already selected Roman history as his peculiar department, but he renewed and extended his acquaintance at the same time with the whole range of classical authors. On his father's account, as well as his own, he exerted himself to procure geographical notices of various countries from the foreigners who thronged Copenhagen at the time; and under the friendly instruction of Count Ludolf, the Austrian ambassador, who had been born at Constantinople, he acquired a considerable knowledge of the Persian language.

During this period of his life he suffered much from his conscious incapacity to interest himself heartily in the outward world; or, rather, this was the form in which the melancholy of loneliness, inexperience and disappointment displayed itself. The true relation of fragmentary superiority to finished me

diocrity cannot be discovered by the young, who suffer meanwhile both from their defects in worldly wisdom, and from the indifference of others to their intellectual advantages. He reproached himself bitterly with indolence and distraction of mind, and sought for a cure in resolutions registered in letters and diaries. There was happily a better remedy awaiting him. In his journies between Holstein and Copenhagen he had more than once visited the family of Behrens, and by degrees ventured on a nearer approach to the once formidable Amalie. He saw in her the ideal of his youthful fancy, the image, as he characteristically expresses himself, of a Roman matron. She is represented as beautiful, and in intellect and heart she was worthy of Niebuhr. She returned his affection, and it was determined that the marriage should take place as soon as he could obtain a settled provision. He had been destined by Schimmelmann for the consulship at Paris, and afterwards for that at Constantinople, but both schemes had fallen to the ground. He wished to obtain a professorship at Kiel, in the neighbourhood of his friends and connections, and received coldly a proposal of the Danish ministry, that he should attach himself to a seminary which they proposed to establish at Copenhagen. The foreign language, and the severity of the climate, were undoubtedly serious disadvantages; on the other hand it could not but be flattering to a young man, in his twentysecond year, to receive the offer of an appointment which had been successively intended for Brunckh, Wolf, Voss and Heyne. Finally, he determined to leave the point undecided, while he completed his studies in England, when he hoped to acquire practical vigour of character as well as direct instruction. He might have found philology in greater perfection in a German University, but he considered that he had already arrived at a point of knowledge at which no living scholar could assist him. When the fear that a French invasion might render England a dangerous residence had passed by for the time, he left Copenhagen, and, after a short stay in Holstein, sailed from Cuxhaven to Yarmouth in July 1798.

The accounts of his residence among us are principally contained in a series of letters to his betrothed bride; in

which, while we read them with curiosity and interest, we could not but wonder at the coldness of the business-like style. We observe with great satisfaction, however, that in the concluding notice, at the end of the third volume, the editor of the letters apologetically admits the suppression, in this part of the correspondence, of many tender expressions. That he judged wrongly we are accordingly unprejudiced witnesses, and in similar cases we would wish to establish the rule, that when there is a doubt as to the admission of a biographical document on no better ground than the warmth of the feelings which it displays, it should be decided in favour of publication.

With his habits of observation and generalization, with the stock of knowledge which he brought with him, and the general zeal which he felt to increase it, Niebuhr might, notwithstanding his youth and inexperience, have familiarized himself with England so thoroughly, that his opinions of our institutions and national character would have been entitled to paramount authority. We have little fault to find with his remarks as far as they go; but we regret that, in direct contradiction to his declared intentions, he gave way to his habitual preference of books to men. He never seems in after life to have discovered how very little he contrived to see of England in its peculiar character. Arriving in London with letters of introduction to many eminent men, he was prevented by shyness from delivering them to those of higher rank, and was unreasonably disappointed in finding that the kindness of his scientific friends did not extend to intimacy. London was in a great measure empty, and he could not wait to see it in the season; for he had resolved to attend the lectures in Edinburgh; and his zeal to see the north was increased by a Scotch acquaintance, who, with the characteristic patriotism of his race, assured his credulous hearer, that all the coldness, dulness and want of philosophical enthusiasm, which he found in London, would vanish as soon as he crossed the Tweed.

He remained the greater part of a year at Edinburgh, in diligent attendance on the various scientific lectures, accompanied by severe private study. His leisure hours were passed in the house of Mr. Scott, a cadet of the Harden

family, who had been intimate with his father in India, and now received Niebuhr as a son. As usual he avoided general society with a perverseness which seems in this instance almost unaccountable. In the summer he made a short tour in the Lothians, and visited Mr. Grant, of Redcastle, in Kinross-shire, with the view of obtaining information as to certain questions of oriental geography. In November 1799 he returned to Holstein.

The gallery of the House of Commons, the coffee rooms of London, the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, assize courts, county meetings, mansions and parsonages, were the scenes in which a foreigner should have sought for illustrations of the distinctive character of England. Within his limited circle of observation Niebuhr found abundant evidence to justify his preconceived opinion of the great superiority of our countrymen to his own in practical vigour and energy: yet he complained of the shallowness of party reasonings, the want of love for theoretical perfection, and the scarcity of commanding genius, as the proof that the boasted results of hereditary freedom were illusive. If he had drawn his knowledge from such sources as those which we have enumerated, he might perhaps have thought, that in the complicated machinery which yet habitually works itself, liberty had given nobler proofs of its productive power; and provided for itself more durable securities, than schemes of ideal politics, or the accident of individual genius. We should never have learned from him that Pitt, or Fox, or Wilberforce were acting on the mind of the nation. They might not be in his estimation great men, but he ought not to have disregarded the vast power which they wielded.

We especially regret that he gave himself no opportunity of observing the practical working of the English church. His boundless knowledge indeed included a correct view and warm appreciation of the position which it occupies in relation to popery and protestantism; but reading alone cannot have explained to him the extent to which it modifies the other parts of the constitution. Its intimate connection with the aristocracy, and the alternate affection and jealousy with which they regard it,-its spiritual and temporal influence with the people, in relation to whom it is itself aristocratic, and

above all the effect produced on the national character by the contemplation of a priesthood which includes landlords, magistrates and men of business, as contrasted with the desecularized continental ideal, to which our clergy had then approximated less than now, would have been a fit study for the statesman and historian, and have enabled him to bestow on us invaluable instruction. It is impossible for men to judge impartially of their own institutions; and no foreign writer has, as far as we know, bestowed upon this branch of our system the attention which it deserves: neither can any other authority claim the same respect as Niebuhr's.

Of the religious character of Scotland he formed a harsh, and in our opinion in some degree an unfair judgement. He could not be expected to sympathise with the somewhat pedantic strictness of the Sabbatarian and other observances of the people; but he might have found in the manly and stern morality, which was the fruit of their undoubting belief, some compensation for the want of that connexion with imagination and feeling, which for such a mind as his is the primary requisite in religion. Another proof of the national coldness and reserve of both Scotch and English he found in the rarity and constraint of youthful friendship: he said that enthusiastic communion of thoughts devoted to the highest objects, that sympathy or confidence in sympathy for the more delicate interests of a friend's moral or intellectual progress, was unknown in a country where it was a violation of national taste for men to speak of the things which most personally affect them. He was at least right in the general maxim, that friendship in the highest sense can only exist between cultivated minds. Good fathers, husbands, sons, may have their talk of bullocks, but the intercourse of friendship cannot be exclusively employed on the affairs of daily life. There can seldom be enough of passion in it for it to attach to the bare personality; it demands support and elevation from a union with the intellect, which it repays by clothing and enriching it with the warmth of human feelings. When we consider the different degrees of excitement which the youth of England and of Germany at the time respectively received from the influence of literature and philosophy, we think it most probable that Niebuhr's comparative estimate was just.