Up to this moment have not the fairies done well? But now comes a new element into the calculations, a new phase of the drama, with which no fairies condescend to deal. Young Niebuhr like the rest of us _must live_, must earn the wherewithal, must choose his career, his profession. Here the fairies forsake him. Here, in more true and prosaic style, he is unfaithful to himself. We cannot but regard it as the great and continuous error of his life, that he did not devote himself to learning as his profession. He could have done so. At the very same time there came an offer of a professorship, and a proposal to be the private secretary of Count Schimmelman, the Danish minister of finance. He chose the latter. That the professorship offered to him was connected with but slender emolument, can have had little to do with the determination, because other and more eminent and more lucrative professorships would have speedily been open to him, and because the mere love of money was never a strong inducement in the mind of Niebuhr. Political ambition seems to have been the motive that turned the scale. Looking now at his life as an accomplished completed career, it is impossible not to regret this choice. We see ten of the most precious years of his early manhood wasted in financial and other public business, which a hundred others could have transacted as well; it is, in fact, a mere fragment of his life that is exclusively or uninterruptedly devoted to letters. He is more frequently at the head of some national bank, or revenue department, than in the professor’s chair; and the author of the Roman history has to say of himself, that “calculations are my occupation; merchants, Jews, and brokers, my society.”