The history, however, proceeded very slowly. When public tranquillity was restored, Niebuhr did not return to his professor’s chair; he went, as is very generally known, to Rome on a diplomatic mission. Here he spent a considerable portion of his life; and although his residence in that city might seem peculiarly favourable to his great undertaking, yet it proved otherwise;—either his time was occupied in the business or the ceremonial attached to his appointment, or his mind was unhinged. Besides, we have seen, from his own confession, that he needed such stimulants as those he found at Berlin, of friends, and conversation, and a literary duty, to keep him to one train of inquiry or of labour. It was very much the habit of his mind to propose to himself numerous works or literary investigations. We have amongst his loose memoranda of an earlier date one headed thus, “Works which I have to complete.” The list comprises no less than seven works, every one of which would have been a laborious undertaking. No scheme or outline of these several projected books was to be found, but the writer of the Memoir before us remarks that we are not to infer from this that such memoranda contain mere projects, towards whose execution no step was ever taken. “That Niebuhr proposed,” says Madame Hensler, “any such work to himself, was a certain sign that he had read and thought deeply on the subject; but he was able to trust so implicitly to his extraordinary memory, that he never committed any portion of his essays to paper till the whole was complete in his own mind. His memory was so wonderfully retentive that he scarcely ever forgot anything which he had once heard or read, and the facts he knew remained present to him at all times, even in their minutest details. “His wife and sister once playfully took up Gibbon, and asked him questions from the table of contents about the most trivial things, by way of testing his memory. They carried on the examination till they were tired, and gave up all hope of even detecting him in a momentary uncertainty, though he was at the same time engaged in writing on some other subject.” Niebuhr married a second time. Madame Hensler, accompanied by her niece, had visited him in his affliction; their presence gradually cheered him; and Margaret Hensler, the niece, “soothed him with her gentle attentions, and gave him peculiar pleasure with her sweet singing. After some time he engaged himself to her, and married her before he left Berlin.”