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Updated: June 1, 2025
Every thing preparatory to, and connected with the travels of Niebuhr and his associate, was judiciously and well planned and executed: the selection of Michaelis to draw up the enquiries and observations to be made; those he actually proposed: and the learned men sent out, who were respectively conversant in physics, natural history, geography, and the connected and auxiliary branches of science.
Niebuhr had never spoken to his wife of her approaching end: though longing to know her parting wishes, he dared not break the physician's orders against excitement. Once only, a few days before her death, as he was holding her in his arms, he asked her if there was nothing he could do for her sake no pleasure he could give her.
If Niebuhr is right in his statement that the power of making wills was given to plebeians, it shows a greater liberality on the part of patricians than what they generally have had credit for, and is hardly to be reconciled with the statement of Lord Mackenzie, that all marriages between patricians and plebeians were prohibited by the new code.
According to the father of the conscientious Doctor Niebuhr, whose recent loss we are deploring, as you doubtless know, the ordinary average pace of one of these wonderful creatures would be seven thousand geometric feet per hour. Our own degenerate race of donkeys can give no idea of the ass in his pride and independence.
Under him the city was greatly augmented by the inhabitants of various Latin cities which he subdued. These settled on the Aventine, and in the valley which separated it from the Palatine, supposed by Niebuhr to be the origin of the Roman Plebs, though it is maintained by Lewis that the Plebeian order was coaeval with the foundation of the city.
Independently therefore of their value as poems, these compositions are a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers.
The great critic Niebuhr, by whose opinions I am guided in the views I express of these events, admits that the Greek accounts, when examined, present little that was possible. The Persian empire does not seem to have suffered at all; and Plato, whose opinion must be considered as of very great authority, says that, on the whole, the Persian wars reflect extremely little honour on the Greeks.
But his style is undoubtedly of its own kind scholarly and excellent; the matter of his history suffers from the common fault of taking Niebuhr at too high a valuation. His father, Zachary Macaulay, though a very active agitator against the Slave Trade, was a strong Tory; and the son's conversion to Whig opinions was effected at some not clearly ascertained period after he had reached manhood.
How often since that time, down to the days of Gibbon and Niebuhr, have the same ruins stirred men's minds to the same reflections! This double current of feeling is also recognizable in the 'Dittamondo' of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about the year 1360 a description of visionary travels, in which the author is accompanied by the old geographer Solinus, as Dante was by Virgil.
Hettner quotes a passage from the minor writings of Niebuhr, in which the historian compares Diderot with Petronius, as having both of them been honest and well-intentioned men, who in shameless times were carried towards cynicism by their deep contempt for the prevailing vice.
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