FKOM KEVOLUTION OF JULY TO DEATH OF THE KING. 195 



exaggerated recommendation he had given to his protege, 

 upon which Buch angrily retorted : ' Well, if you begin to 

 censure praise, we shall all be silenced.' ' That is quite another /> 

 matter,' replied Humboldt ; ' I praise evei^ybody' 



However it may be with the commendation of the forty 

 philologists, or with the panegyric of Varnhagen penned at the 

 same time, whether Humboldt was in this case most sincere 

 when in joke or in earnest for his ironical temperament 

 always rendered such a question doubtful it would be most 

 erroneous to cast the slightest doubt upon the sincerity of the 

 encomium which he lavished upon his brother in the preface. 

 We quote the noble words of the concluding paragraph: 'If 

 all my hopes do not deceive me, the present work, by opening 

 up a vast range of new thought and proving that from the 

 organic structure of a language the intellectual powers of a 

 people may be deduced, will impress the reader with an en- 

 nobling belief in the elevation of mankind. It will create the 

 conviction that the grand treatment of a subject depends not 

 so much upon intellectual endowments as upon nobility of 

 character, upon a mind imbued with an inexhaustible depth 

 of feeling and wholly free from the restrictive influences of 

 the present.' Those who sympathise with this noble expression 

 of opinion and who is there who will refuse to do so ? must 

 acknowledge from internal evidence that it is the genuine 

 feeling of the writer. Alexander von Humboldt was wonderfully 

 gifted with the power of raising himself out of the ordinary 

 atmosphere of his innate vanity and irony to a c grand treatment 

 of a subject,' not only in matters relating to science, but on 

 every other subject when once he had become alive to its 

 importance : to become truly great, his character needed only 

 to resume its natural elevation from the condescension with 

 which he adapted himself to the trivial events of daily life. 



He raised to his brother a memorial of still higher value 

 by undertaking the editorship of his ' Collected Works,' in 

 which he secured the assistance of Karl Brandes, although he 

 himself conducted their elaborate preparation and general 

 supervision. He attempted in vain to negotiate for their 

 publication with Gotta, who received the proposal c with some 

 coolness,' and he finally made arrangements with Beimer. The 



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