All who have studied the letters of Busbecq will endorse this opinion; nor is it possible for anyone even superficially acquainted with his writings, not to recognise the work of a man who combined the rarest powers of observation with the greatest industry and the greatest honesty. He was eminently what is called ‘a many-sided man’; nothing is above him, nothing beneath him. His political information is important to the soberest of historians, his gossiping details would gladden a Macaulay; the Imperial Library at Vienna is rich with manuscripts and coins of his collection. To him scholars owe the first copy of the famous Monumentum Ancyranum. We cannot turn to our gardens without seeing the flowers of Busbecq around us—the lilac, the tulip, the syringa. So much was the first of these associated with the man who first introduced it to the West, that Bernardin de Saint Pierre proposed to change its name from lilac to Busbequia. Throughout his letters will be found hints for the architect, the physician, the philologist, and the statesman; he has stories to charm a child, and tales to make a grey-beard weep. Of his careful and scientific investigations it is almost unnecessary to cite examples. Never having seen a camelopard, and finding that one had been buried at Constantinople, he had the animal dug up, and a careful examination made of its shape and capabilities. On his second journey to Constantinople he took a draughtsman with him, to sketch any curious plants and animals he might find. He sent his physician to Lemnos to make investigations with regard to Lemnian earth—a medicine famous in those days; while he despatched an apothecary of Pera to the Lake of Nicomedia to gather acorus[5] for his friend Mattioli, the celebrated botanist. While furnishing information of the highest value, Busbecq never assumes the air of a pedant. He tells his story in a frank and genial way, not unlike that of the modern newspaper correspondent. If to combine amusement and instruction is the highest art in this branch of literature, he would have been invaluable as a member of the staff of some great newspaper. Among books, Kinglake’s _Eothen_ is perhaps the nearest parallel to Busbecq’s Turkish letters; the former is more finished in style—Busbecq evidently did not retouch his first rough draft—but it does not contain one tithe of the information. Such is the author for whom we venture to ask the attention of the English reader.