scarcely have occurred to any one, or have served as a recommendation for its originator. In this connection we meet Abeken again among those who accompanied Professor Lepsius on his exploring tour through Upper Egypt in 1842, when he also visited the Holy Land. He entered the Foreign Office under Heinrich von Arnim, and there he remained until his death in August, 1872, notwithstanding the important changes that had occurred in the meantime, a model of loyalty and attachment, even though his virtues recalled in many ways those of the venerable old furniture to which I alluded just now. The extracts from the diary during the war have already given some instances of the exceptional and occasionally comic attraction which everything connected with the Court and other princely circles seemed to exercise upon Abeken, and the subsequent chapters will contain a few more. In this respect he was the very antitype of his colleague Bucher, as also in the fact that he was particularly sociable and talkative. It was to satisfy the longing which he felt for intercourse with persons of rank that he used to frequent the circles which made the Radziwill Palace their headquarters. He was unable to forego these visits even when the society that collected there formed the centre of the ultramontane opposition to the ecclesiastical policy of the Chancellor. Apart from such social gatherings as the above, the old gentleman must have felt himself most at home at the weekly meetings of the _Graeca_, a society “consisting chiefly of former _Romans_,” the rules of which excluded all political discussions, its sole object in addition to its social aims being of a philological and æsthetic character.