Varnhagen reports under date of September 9th, 1853, in his diary: “Humboldt had advised me of his coming; he came about half-past one o’clock, and remained till half-past two o’clock, a mere visit, nothing of business; he felt the necessity of unburdening himself of many things. First he vented his bitter and indignant scorn on the speeches of the King in Elbing and Hirschberg, and on the utter absence of vigor, which makes itself known in such disconnected ebullitions. Then he spoke with the utmost contempt of von Raumer, the Minister of Public Worship and Instruction, of his brutality and insolence, his hatred of all science, his pernicious activity. ‘The King,’ Humboldt said, ‘hates and despises all his ministers, but this one particularly, and speaks of him as of an ass; what particularly nettles him is, that Raumer opposes all the King’s wishes, and he keeps him in office nevertheless, as he keeps all of them, because he has them, and every change is a troublesome affair.’ The case of the brothers Schlagintweit was cited as an instance. The King wished to aid them in their voyage to the Himalaya Mountains; the minister refused; the King ordered him to hear the opinion of Humboldt, which was a most favorable one, but Raumer insisted upon his opinion, which, he said, was not changed by Humboldt. Then the King, who confessed himself to be powerless against his minister, wrote to Bunsen, who took the matter in hand, and the brothers Schlagintweit now receive English aid. And the very same King, who pretends to be so jealous of his prerogatives, permits them to be thus encroached upon? ‘Yes, sometimes he delights in playing the part of a constitutional monarch, absolves himself from all responsibility when the matter is a delicate one, answers demands made upon him by adverting to the difficulty of obtaining the signatures of his ministers, and even pretends to regard that “baggage, the state” as something with which he had little concern, accuses the ministers of forgetting him in their devotion to that “baggage, the state,” &c., &c. “‘In the asking of small sums the King often experiences the greatest resistance, large ones he gets; he is refused three hundred thalers for a poor scientific man or artist, forty thousand thalers for buying something, they dare not refuse. What a mess of confusion and disaster! The King is quite satisfied that he is permitted to cook up church matters to his heart’s content, for these are considered separate from the state, no minister has a word in them.’ That I do not understand and it cannot be so, the ministers I believe have their hands in it too. ‘The meanest fellow of the whole concern is privy counsellor Niebuhr, a low, canting parasite, full of spite and venom.