48 



Gottingen to return my thanks to the professors, and 

 to ask them whether it would he agreeable to their 

 feelings if I were to reinstate all the seven professors." 

 These are words that flow from a noble nature. I shall 

 not talk to the Crown Prince about your Essay on 

 Niebuhr, with which I thoroughly agree. 



Your old and attached friend, 



A. v. HOT. 



XLI. 



HUMBOLDT TO VABNHAGEN. 



Wednesday, ISth March, 1840. 



An insipid pamphlet of M. Gretsch against MelgunofF, 

 and against a book utterly unknown to me Konig's* 

 full of Siberia, bow-strings, secret service money, 

 and Eussian patriotism an intolerable production ! 

 Would you like to read it, my dear friend ? You are 

 the only one of us that can understand it entirely. 

 The book would almost reconcile me to M. Melgunoff, 

 against whom I had begun to conceive some little dis- 

 like. I certainly have no recollection of him, or the 

 conversation I had with him; but he must have 

 strangely interpreted and translated in his own style 

 the language I addressed to him, when he makes me 

 enter the lists against one, the treasures of whose 

 mind and the grace of whose diction as well as man- 

 ner, I am always praising. Is it likely that I should 



* Heinrich Konig, a German novelist of some note, published in 1837, 

 assisted by a Eussian friend, Melgunoff, " Literarische Bilder aus Buss- 

 land" (Literary Pictures from Bussia). Nicolaus Gretsch, a Bussian Coun- 

 cillor of State, a most prolific, but very shallow author, attacked Konig's book 

 in the pamphlet to which allusion is made above. TR. 



