SOJ 



NIEBUHR, BARTHOLD GEORGE. 



NIEBUHR, BARTHOLD GEORGE. 



602 



commerce for the East Indian department, and of secretary .and 

 accountant to the African consulate. The income arising from this 

 appointment enabled him to marry Amalie Behrens in May 1800, and 

 he resided with her at Copenhagen till the year 1806, performing his 

 duties with the greatest punctuality and diligence, and to the entire 

 satisfaction of his employers. He did not however altogether neglect 

 his literary pursuits; they formed his evening amusement, and he 

 found time in the midst of his business avocations to give lessons to 

 the nephew of his friend Count Schimmelmann, and to translate part 

 of an Arabic history of the conquest of Asia. In the spring of 1803 

 he had to make a journey into Germany on public business connected 

 with the administration of the Danish finances. An offer waa made 

 to Niebuhr at the end of 1805 to enter into the service of the Prussian 

 government, and his dissatisfaction at the prospect of having some one 

 appointed over his head, and the advantages held out by the situation 

 proposed to him, induced him to accept the situation of joint-director 

 of the first bank at Berlin, with the promise of further promotion. 



Niebuhr arrived at the Prussian capital on the 5th of October 

 1806, shortly before the battle of Jena. A few days after that event 

 he was obliged to take flight with all the other officials. He resided 

 till April 1S07 at Menuel and Konigsberg, and then became one of the 

 secretaries of the prime-minister Hardenberg, having chiefly to attend 

 to the supply of the army then in the field. This office kept him 

 with the head-quarters of the army till the battle of Friedland, after 

 which he went to Riga. The provisions of the peace of Tilsit having 

 exacted the dismissal of Hardenberg, his office was put into commission, 

 which consisted of Von Altenstein, Von Schon, Sta'gemann, Von 

 Klewitz, and Niebuhr. Upon the accession of Stein to the adminis- 

 tration, Niebuhr was despatched to Amsterdam to negociate a loan, 

 and he resided there till April 1809. In December 1809 he was 

 nominated privy-councillor, and received a high appointment in the 

 administration of the funds. This brought him to Berlin, where and 

 at Konig*berg he residtd through the winter of 1809-10. The oppo- 

 sition to a financial plan of his made him however more anxious than 

 ever to retire from public life ; and after some fruitless attempts on 

 the part of the government to retain him in office, ho exchanged his 

 public situation for the post of historiographer to the king, vacant by 

 the death of J. Von Muller. About the same time he was elected 

 member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. 



The opening of the University of Berlin at Michaelmas 1810 brought 

 forward Niebuhr as a lecturer on Roman history ; and the lectures 

 which he delivered in this and the following year were published in 

 1811, and contain the germs of those new combinations and discoveries 

 for which Niebuhr will be best known to posterity. The time which 

 he spent at Berlin, from 1810 to 1813, seems to have been one of the 

 happiest periods of his life. He formed a small philological society, 

 consisting of Spalding, Buttmann, Heindorf, Schleiermacher, Ancillon, 

 Silvern, favigny, Schmedding, and Nicolovius, and with these dis- 

 tinguished scholars he spent all his spare hours. He felt very acutely 

 the loss which this society sustained in the death of Spalding (on the 

 7th of June 1811). How greatly Niebuhr valued his intercourse with 

 these highly-gifted men may be presumed from the way in which he 

 speaks of them at the end of the preface to his ' History ; ' and there 

 can be no doubt that many valuable hints in that work were suggested 

 to him by his friend Savigny in particular. 



Niebuhr's studious life was interrupted by the war of liberation, as 

 it was called, in 1813-14. He took an active part in these events. He 

 was chiefly with the head-quarters of the allied army till February 

 1814, when he was again sent to Holland on public business. He 

 returned to Berlin in the October of that year, and resided there till 

 the summer of 1816, when he proceeded as ambassador to the court 

 of Rome. During this residence at the capital he wrote, besides some 

 political tracts, a biography of his father, who died in April 1815, and 

 Borne essays for the Royal Academy of Sciences, and resumed his 

 intercourse with his philological friends. He also instructed the 

 Crowu-Prince of Prussia in the principles of political economy. 



His wife died on the 20th of June 1815, shortly before he received 

 his appointment as ambassador. Her sister, his friend the widow 

 Hvneler, came to Berlin in April 1816, accompanied by her niece and 

 adopted child Margaret Hensler, the orphan daughter of Christian 

 Hensler, who had been professor of theology at Kiel ; the young lady 

 became his second wife before he started for Rome, and the widow 

 returned to Holstein. 



Niebnhr did not receive his final instructions till after he had been 

 four years in Rome. By his interest however with the pope and his 

 secretary, the Cardinal Consalvi, he contrived to bring the negociations 

 to a close in seven months after the arrival of his instructions. The 

 Prussian minister, Hardenberg, went to Home himself in February 

 1821, and Niebuhr gave him the credit of completing the concordat, 

 though his own services in the matter were fully acknowledged by 

 bis court ; and ho receiver) from the King of Prussia, as a mark of his 

 satisfaction and approbation, the order of tho Red Eagle of the second 

 class, to which the Emperor of Austria added the first-class decoration 

 of the Leopold order of knighthood. 



The climate of Home had always disagreed with his wife, and as 

 the business which had brought him to the papal court was now 

 finished, he wrote for his recal. This was after the birth of his third 

 daughter, in February 1822. Ho was advised in the first instance to 



apply for leave of absence for a year, which left his return open to 

 him. He spent part of the autumn of 18-2 at Albano, and also made 

 a journey to Tivoli. In March 1823 he went to Naples, in order to 

 visit his friend De Serre, who was French ambassador in that city ; 

 and after staying there till the beginning of May, set out for Berlin. 



In consequence of some slight difference with the leading men in 

 the capital, Niebuhr retired to Bonn, where a university had been 

 recently established, and where his friend and former secretary, 

 Brandis, was a professor. Here he was attached to the university as 

 an adjunct professor, and gave lectures on Roman antiquities and 

 various subjects. At the same time he availed himself of every 

 opportunity of promoting and encouraging the labours of other 

 scholars. It was partly with this view that he set on foot the ' Rhein- 

 isches Museum,' a philological repository, in which the shorter essays 

 and scattered thoughts of learned men might be given to the world. 

 The first volume of this periodical appeared in 1827, under the joint 

 editorship of Biiekh, Niebuhr, and Brandis. The new edition of the 

 Byzantine historians, which was commenced under his direction, was 

 intended only as a diversion, taken up to relieve his mind from the 

 severer studies required by the revision and correction of his 'History 

 of Rotne.' He brought out the first volume of the new edition of 

 this history early in 1827 ; the alterations in this edition are so nume- 

 rous that it may almost be considered as a new work. The publication 

 of the second volume was delayed by a fire, which burned his house 

 to the ground and consumed all the manuscript with the exception of 

 a leaf that he happened to have lent to a friend, and it did not appear 

 till the end of 1830. Niebuhr's sensitive mind was much affected by 

 the revolution which took place in Paris in the July of that year, and 

 by tho subsequent revolt of Belgium. He looked forward with tho 

 deepest anxiety to the probable consequences of those events; he 

 expected the renewal of that devastating war which had been tho 

 result of the first French revolution ; and feared that his own happy 

 dwelling-place by the Rhine would be the first to suffer from the 

 invaders. These considerations preyed upon his spirits, and he sunk 

 under the continued agitation of mind produced by them. He died 

 on the 2nd of January 1831, leaving behind him several children. A 

 son, whose education Niebuhr superintended with the greatest anxiety, 

 and whose remarkable precocity is frequently spoken of in his letters, 

 now holds a hi^h office in the Prussiaa civil service. 



It is difficult to conceive a more excellent and delightful person than 

 Barthold Niebuhr appears to have been ; there is perhaps no one, of 

 whom we have read, who has combined so blameless a character and 

 so amiable a disposition with such boundless acquirements and such 

 brilliant intellectual qualities. His 'History of Home' is perhaps the 

 most original historical work that this age has produced. To under- 

 stand what he has done in this work, we should keep in mind the 

 state of knowledge on the subject before his time. The disjointed 

 ruins had lain for ages in a confused heap, though there was hardly a 

 child in Europe who was not familiar with their rude outlines, and 

 though many a skilful and laborious workman had endeavoured to 

 reduce them to symmetry and order. Niebuhr, by a series of com- 

 binations which will appear most surprising to those who are most 

 capable of appreciating works of geniua, succeeded in reconstructing 

 from the scattered fragments a stately fabric, which, if it is not 

 identical with the original structure, is at least almost perfect and 

 complete in itself. There cannot be a greater mistake than to sup- 

 pose, as some have done, that Niebuhr was a sceptic whose sole delight 

 was to render insecure the basis of historical evidence. He has actually 

 done more than any one that ever lived towards extracting truth and 

 certainty from the misty and mystical legends of early tradition, and 

 toward substituting rational conviction for irrational credulity. The 

 great object which he proposed to himself, in all his philological specu- 

 lations, waa to reproduce a true image of the past by getting rid of tho 

 deceitful influence of the present. This view he often expresses in 

 very plain terms. Thus, he says in his introductory lecture on Roman 

 history ('Kleine Schriften,' p. 93), "As there is nothing which Eastern 

 nations find more difficult to conceive than the idea of a republican 

 constitution, as the people of Hindustan cannot be induced to regard 

 the East India Company as an association of proprietors, or in any 

 other light than as a princess, just so is it with even tho acutest of 

 the moderns when they study ancient history, unless they have con- 

 trived by critical and philological studies to shake off the influence of 

 their habitual associations." And in a letter to Count Adam Moltke, 

 he exclaims (' Lebensnachrichten,' ii. p. 91), " 0, how people would 

 cherish philology did they but know how delightfully it enables us to 

 recal to life the fairest periods of antiquity. Reading is the most 

 trifling part of it ; the chief business is to domesticate ourselves in 

 Greece and Rome at the most different periods. Would that I could 

 write history so vividly that I could so discriminate what is fluctuating 

 and uncertain, and so develop what is confused and intricate, that 

 every one, when he heard the name of a Greek of the age of Thucy- 

 dides or Polybius, or a Roman of the days of Cato or Tacituc, 

 might be able to form a clear and adequate idea of what he was." 

 The very existence of such a general design presumes a lively fancy 

 and active imagination ; though these are qualities often possessed by 

 shallow and superficial persons, they are very rarely combined with 

 that extensive and minute learning for which Niebuhr was so distin- 

 guished. The range of his acquisitions was really wonderful. He 



