Very surprising accounts are given of the boy’s precocious sagacity in picturing to himself a historic scene, with all its details, or following out the probable course of events. These accounts are rather _too_ surprising. When the war broke out in Turkey, it so excited his imagination that he not only dreamt of it, but anticipated in his dreams, and we suppose also in his waking hours, the current of events. His notions were so just, and his knowledge of the country, and the situations of the towns, so accurate, that, we are told, “the realisation of his nightly anticipations generally appeared in the journals a short time afterwards.” One would say that the fairies had indeed been with him. Madame Hensler’s narrative partakes here, in some measure, of that marvellous character which accompanies family traditions of all kinds, whether of the Roman _gens_ or the Danish household. But on other occasions, and from Niebuhr’s own words, we learn that, owing to his minute knowledge, his most tenacious memory, and his vivid imagination, he, at a very early time, manifested that spirit of quite philosophical divination which led him to his discoveries in Roman history. We say quite philosophical divination; for we do not suppose that Niebuhr claimed for himself, or his friends for him, any mysterious intuition into the course of events; but there is occasionally, both in the memoir and in the letters, a vagueness of expression on this subject which might lead to misapprehension, and which one wishes had been avoided. We must now follow this precocious pupil to the University at Kiel. A lad of seventeen, we find him already a companion for professors. Writing home to his parents, he says of Dr Hensler:—“My ideas about the origin of the Greek tribes, the history of the colonisation of the Greek cities, and my notions in general about the earliest migration from west to east, are new to him; and he thinks it probable that they may be correct. He exhorts me to work them out, and bring them into as clear a form as I can.” Meanwhile, he is to be occupied, heart and soul, in studying metaphysics under Reinhold, one of the most celebrated disciples of Kant. To enumerate the studies in which he is alternately engaged, would be to pass in review the whole series of subjects which are taught in a university; just as, at a somewhat later period, to enumerate all the languages which he had learnt, would be simply to name in order every language which a European scholar, by the aid of grammar and dictionary, could learn. His father, with a very excusable pride, makes out, in one of his letters, a list of his son’s attainments of this kind: he was, more or less, master of some twenty languages.