258 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



having, upon a rumour of his death, e immediately bespoken, 

 without one word of becoming regret, a cast of his skull from 

 Eauch.' 1 ' What intercourse,' he remarks, ' can be had with 

 the outer world of Germany, Italy, England, and France, by a 

 monarch who, while enthusiastic in his love of science and art, 

 and easily impressionable, is subject to the strangest contra- 

 diction of inclination, and the inextricable entanglement of 

 opposing desires, who, while possessed of the purest and noblest 

 principles, is unfortunately surrounded by those who hinder 

 him from seeing himself as he really is ! The correspondence 

 arising from such a state of things is of a kind in which ex- 

 traneous help is impossible.' 



The duties incumbent upon Humboldt in his position were 

 felt, under the weight of years, increasingly irksome. Com- 

 plaints henceforth escape him more frequently of c the over- 

 whelming amount of work occasioned by his intimacy with the 

 king,' and ' of the distressing interruptions to which he was 

 subject.' The reading aloud, in which he was often relieved 

 by Tieck and others, was less onerous than the incessant occu- 

 pation occasioned by the king's private correspondence, which 

 Frederick William was in the habit of committing to him over- 

 night to prepare for the following morning, while even the 

 letters to potentates were presented to him ' for careful revision 

 and lenient criticism.' The greatest annoyance to Humboldt 

 was the incessant questioning of the king, to which he was 

 compelled to be almost a daily victim, as Frederick William 

 looked for his presence every evening at eight o'clock, and com- 

 plained bitterly if, through accepting an invitation elsewhere, 

 he was absent from the mid-day meal, which the king, at Sans- 

 souci, usually took alone. In replying to this volley of questions, 

 he was often obliged to request the assistance of his friends. 

 Thus, from Encke he had to seek the reason of the peculiarity 

 of the transverse numbers formed by products of the number 

 nine ; from Dove the cause of abnormal meteorological pheno- 

 mena ; from Bockh the meaning and etymology of ' parricida,' 

 or ' madeira ; ' while from Curtius he would seek information 

 upon various classical subjects, as, for instance, concerning the 

 population of ancient Rome and Athens, the value of the gold 



1 See Varnhagen, ' Tagebiicher,' vol. ii. p. 260. 



