All honour to the historian who unravels for us the obscurities of the past! Nevertheless, one simple truth will stare us in the face. We take infinite pains to understand the Roman _comitia_; we read, not without considerable labour, some pages of Thucydides; yet the daily English newspaper has been bringing to our door accounts of a political experiment now enacting before us, more curious and more instructive than Roman and Grecian history can supply. The experiment, which has been fairly performed on a neighbouring shore, gives a more profound lesson, and a far more important one, than twenty Peloponnesian wars. That experiment has demonstrated to us that, _by going low enough_, you may obtain a public opinion that shall sanction a tyranny over the whole intelligence of the country. A man who, whatever his abilities, had acquired no celebrity in civil or military life, inherits a name; with that name he appeals to the universal suffrage of France; and universal France gives him permission to do what he will with her laws and institutions—to destroy her parliament—to silence her press—to banish philosophy from her colleges. It is a lesson of the utmost importance; and moreover, a fact which, at the present moment, justifies some alarm. It is not intelligent France we have for our neighbour, but a power which represents its military and its populace, and which surely, if we are to calculate on its duration, is of a very terrific character. But we must pursue our biographical sketch of the life of Niebuhr. Although our professor never actually shoulders that musket of which we have seen him practising the use, and gets no nearer to the smoke of powder than to survey the battle of Bautzen from the heights, he is involved in all the civil turmoils of the time. He is summoned to Dresden, where the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Russia are in conference together. He follows the Sovereigns to Prague; he is again despatched to Holland, to negotiate there for subsidies with the English commissioners. Saddest event of all, his domestic happiness receives a fatal blow in the death of his wife. She must have been a woman of tender spirit and elevated character. She entered ardently into all the pursuits, and shared all the fame, of her husband. A few days before her death, Niebuhr, as he was holding her in his arms, asked her if there was no pleasure that he could give her—nothing that he could do for her sake. She replied, with a look of unutterable love, “You shall finish your history, whether I live or die.”