received with every civility and consideration, and continued for several years in correspondence with Stanislaus. He arrived at Copenhagen in November, and was received with great distinction by the court, the ministers, and the learned of the kingdom. His first business was to deliver the accounts of the expenses of the journey. It appears that the whole expedition did not cost above 21,000 rix-dollars (32407.), including the sums which had been laid out for instruments, &c. Having executed this task, he began to set himself about the more laborious duty of giving an account of his journey, and from his own papers and those of Forskaal, supplying the information, in search of which the expedition had been sent out. He applied himself to answer the questions submitted by Michaelis, as well as the more important ones regarding the history of Yemen, proposed by the French Académie des Inscriptions. He abandoned the idea of publishing his astronomical observations, since nobody could examine them, as Mayer would have done, had he still been alive; his other materials were arranged together, and published in the two works which have appeared. The copperplates were paid for by the Danish government, and made a present of to the author. On the change of ministry, and dismissal of Count Bernstorf, Niebuhr, although no public character, did not conceal his attachment to his patron, and accompanied him, with a few faithful friends, to Roeskilde. He never condescended to wait upon Struensee, the new minister, nor did he ever appear in public, as long as he was in power; he spoke openly his sentiments, approved of the popular rising against that minister, and rejoiced at his downfal. At Michaelmas 1772 appeared his description of Arabia. Such a work could expect but a small number of readers, and the author lost a great deal of money by its publication. A French translation made in Holland had more success, but he derived no profit from it. About this time the arrival at Copenhagen of an ambassador from the Pasha of Tripoli, again excited public curiosity on the subject of Africa, and excited in Niebuhr a strong desire to visit the interior of that continent, to set out on a journey to the Niger by the way of Tripoli and Fezzan. But an accident not very uncommon changed the direction of his career. He formed an attachment for a lady, the daughter of the physician Blumenberg, whom he married; an event, as the French say, auquel il dut le bonheur de sa vie.' The fruit of the marriage was two children, the historian and a daughter. ་ On the publication of his first volume of travels, at Easter 1774, Niebuhr went to Leipsig, not so much on account of business, as from a desire to become acquainted with Reiske. If ever a man of genius and learning has been neglected in Germany by his contemporaries, it was Reiske. Lessing alone, and Niebuhr, paid him due honour during his lifetime; the latter had declared publicly that he never found among the Arabs any man so well acquainted with their literature as Reiske. The second volume of his travels appeared in 1778. It breaks off with his arrival at Haleb. The third volume was to contain the rest of his journey, his treatise on the Turkish Empire and the Mahommedan religion, his notices on Abyssinia, which he had collected in Yemen, and on Sudan, which he had obtained from Abderrachman Aga; but o wing to his pecuniary losses, and to the destruction of his plates, which were consumed by the great fire at Copenhagen, in 1795, it was never published. At this period Niebuhr lived happily at Copenhagen with his family and a small number of friends, but he felt the consequences of the removal of Count Bernstorf from office, and exchanged the military service for a civil employment in Holstein, where he obtained a situation at Meldorf, the capital of the ancient republic of Ditmar. In this situation the principal occupation of the leisure hours of Niebuhr was the education of his children.-As this part of the narrative concerns the illustrious historian, no less than his venerable parent, and is distinguished by a remarkable candour and simplicity, we shall translate the passage from the Biography. "He taught us both geography and history; and to me besides, French and English, and also mathematics; but I am sorry to say, my want of taste for mathematics destroyed all the pleasure he could have in teaching me. He who from his boyhood had seized with avidity every opportunity of acquiring knowledge, was vexed to find us inattentive, or unwilling to learn. He read with me' Cæsar's Commentaries ;' but in this study also the peculiar bent of his mind displayed itself, and he directed our attention more to ancient geography, than to the history itself: the Ancient Gaul of D'Anville, for whom he felt a particular esteem, was constantly lying before us, and I was obliged to look out for every place, and to describe its situation. His instruction was not grammatical; his knowledge of languages consisted only in general impressions left upon his mind. His attempts to teach me Arabic failed, because he would not use any grammar; and he himself had lost the habit of speaking it. I learnt it afterwards by myself, and sent him some translations, which gave him great pleasure. "I retain still a lively recollection of the accounts he gave us of the East, especially in the evenings, when he took us upon his knees, before we went to bed. The history of Mohammed, of the first Chalifs, especially Omar and Ali, for whom he entertained the highest respect, the conquests of the Islam, and the virtues of the heroes of the new faith, were early impressed upon my mind, and almost the first historical books I ever read were concerning them. 66 I also recollect how he took out on a Christmas evening, when I was about ten years old, from a splendid chest which contained his manuscripts, and which was looked upon by the whole family almost as a tabernacle with the greatest reverence, his papers on Africa. He had taught me to draw maps, and with his assistance I drew maps of Sudan and Habesh. "He was never more happy than when I brought him, on his birthday, geographical compilations on oriental countries, and he wished nothing so much as that I might become his successor as a traveller in the East. But the remonstrances of my affectionate mother induced him to give up this plan. As the British East India Company had some obligation to him with respect to the navigation of the upper part of the Red Sea, he expected to get me to India. He was afterwards as glad, as I was myself, that this project had failed; but he used for a long time to put English books, and even English newspapers, into my hands. "Herder sent him his little dissertation on Persepolis, which gave him great pleasure, as it was after many years the first sign he received, that he was not yet quite forgotten by his countrymen. The Turkish war, which broke out about the same time (1788), interested him greatly. As much as he liked the Arabs, he hated the Turks; he hated them as a proud and obstinate race, but still more as the tyrants of the Arabs. The French expedition to Egypt he disliked ; he did not expect any good from it. He had a national antipathy against the French, and had no faith in the French revolution, although he was no partisan of the court, the aristocracy, or the clergy*. "The appearance of Bruce's travels was quite an event in our family. My father never doubted that Bruce had been in Abyssinia, but he wrote an article in the German Museum, shewing that his conversation with Ali Bey was evidently fictitious, as well as the pretended journey over the Red Sea to Babel Mandel, and another on the coast to the south of Kosseir, &c. Other parts of his travels, he regarded as perfectly true and authentic. "My father was highly pleased with a letter from his old friend Dr. Russel, who applied to him for his plan of the town of Aleppo. Of course, my father sent it. It was to be used for the new edition of the description of Aleppo. Major Rennel wrote to my father for his Itineraries through Syria and Natolia, and my father did not hesitate to send them. Marsden gave him a mark of respect, by sending him his history of Sumatra. Silvestre de Sacy, who was preparing for publication his translation of Bark el Yemen, entered into correspondence with my father about Arabia. Niebuhr's description of Arabia, and his map of the empire of Iman, were found so surprisingly correct, that all the places named in that book, except two villages in Tehama, could be found in them. Barbier du Bocage, the geographer, obtained from my father materials for his map of Natolia. The friends of my father in England wished him to publish the third volume of his travels, in an English translation, and the late Earl Donoughmore, then Lord Hutchinson, proposed to arrange this matter with an English publisher; but Niebuhr thought it unfair towards Denmark, to publish his travels in England, and declined the offer." His During the last ten years of his life, our traveller felt sensibly the infirmities of age: he was afflicted with blindness, and other maladies usually attendant on the close of a long and active career. wife had died in 1807, and often during the seven subsequent years, he had avowed himself prepared to join her, but he felt a natural interest in the great struggle which then agitated Europe, and he desired to see how the fate of the world would be decided. This feeling increased in the memorable year in which the French lost the battle of Leipsic. The following picture of him at this period, and the description of his last moments, we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of extracting. Niebuhr adds, in a note, that his father would have judged differently of the French revolution had he known the generation which sprung up from it. "In the autumn of 1814, the whole family was assembled round him. All his features, with the extinguished eyes, had the expression of the worn-out age of an unusually strong constitution. It was impossible to see a more venerable sight. A cossack, who during the war, entered, as an uninvited guest, the room where the silver-haired old man sat, with his head bare, was so struck, that he paid the greatest regard to him. My father was invariably in good humour, cheerful and conversational. We got him to talk again of Persepolis, and he spoke of the walls which contained the inscriptions and bas-reliefs, as if he had seen them the day before. He told us, that although blind in his bed, his soul had still visions of oriental objects. The starry nightly heaven of Asia, and the blue sky of the day, returned in quiet hours, constantly to his imagination. On the 26th April, towards evening, he still was read to; was perfectly sensible, and put some questions, fell asleep, and expired without a struggle. He had attained an age of eighty-two years and six weeks." In reviewing the character of this venerable traveller, his son describes him as simple in habits, pertinacious in his opinions, liable to strong likings and antipathies, for and against particular persons; of purity of manners, and unimpeachable integrity-devoid of a taste for abstract speculation--not partial to poetry, except Homer in the translation of Voss-and the Herman and Dorothea of Göthe-fond of the novels of Fielding and Smollet-but of no other. We give the following passage, merely because it is found in Niebuhr the historian. "He did not trouble himself with the things of the supernatural world. He approached the dark region of futurity, with the intrepidity of a pure conscience. It is singular, that this man, who had so little imagination, awoke us in the night, when his brother died, of whose illness he knew nothing, in order to tell us that his brother was dead." In conclusion, he is described as wholly free from vanity, but the kind regards of such men as Reiske, Silvestre de Sacy, and Rennel, were highly gratifying to him. He declined a patent of nobility, offered to him by the minister Guldberg. "I would not give such offence to my family," he said to a friend, who asked him about it," he who accepts a title of nobility, seems to me, not to think his family respectable enough." DREAMS. a pleasant dream At best can be but dreaming, And if the true may never beam~ Oh! who would slight the seeming."-PRAED. I go-yet I am smiling, I weep-yet am not sad, Tho' a dream be all beguiling, Yet a dream hath made me glad;— And darkness, like the raven, A form hath been before me, And its look was like to thine,- Like a map before my eye,— To make a dream an omen They have nothing more to show,-- London, March 26th, 1829. DIARY FOR THE MONTH OF MARCH. . مدد 12th.-Cases are constantly occurring which prove the extreme injustice of persons accused of capital offences, in the country, being tried only twice a year-and that, too, at periods at such unequal distances the average intervals being, in round numbers, eight months and four. Perhaps, however, there never was a more flagrant instance of this injustice than one that occurred two days ago at Worcester. A man was committed on a charge of horse-stealing, last July-the circumstances of which were such that Mr. Justice Park declared from the bench that, if such evidence were to be considered sufficient to warrant a man's conviction, neither he himself, nor any of the gentlemen around him, could consider themselves at all safe. The Grand Jury, to his Lordship's extreme amazement, found a true bill-it may be mentioned that the committing-magistrate was on it;-but, on the evidence failing early in the case for the prosecution, the learned Judge insisted that the trial should proceed, that the real facts might come out. They were these: the prisoner had had the horse for several months, publicly working it in his cart, and he had bought it from a man, previously to coming into whose possession it had passed through several hands! Truly, if one is to run the risk of lying in gaol for eight months under such circumstances as these, Mr. Tattersall's trade will diminish. |