Having lost his mother before he was six weeks old, the care of his infancy was intrusted to a step-mother; and he was still a lad when his father likewise died. The guardians upon whom the superintendence of his youth at first devolved, entertaining, apparently, but little respect for intellectual pursuits, interrupted his studies; and his maternal uncle, who succeeded them in this important trust, would seem to have wanted the means, if he possessed the will, to direct the course of a young man. Niebuhr was therefore left very much to his own guidance, which, to a man of vigorous intellect, I am far from regarding as a misfortune. The beginnings of life, however, like the beginnings of day, are generally accompanied by mists which obscure the view, and render it absolutely impossible to determine with precision the character of the various paths which present themselves before us; and thus it was that our traveller, who, knowing not that Providence was about to conduct him to a brilliant destiny in the East, at one time studied music, with the intention of becoming an organist, and was afterward led, through accidental circumstances, to apply himself to geometry, for the purpose of practising as a land-surveyor. With this design he repaired, in his twenty-third year, to Bremen, where he discovered a person from whom he might have derived the necessary instruction; but finding that this individual’s domestic economy was under the superintendence of two youthful sisters, whose behaviour towards himself Niebuhr seems to have regarded as forward and indecorous, he immediately quitted this city and proceeded to Hamburgh. It will easily be conceived that the studies of a young man who voluntarily cultivated his intellect as the only means by which he could arrive at distinction, were pursued with ardent enthusiasm. Niebuhr, in fact, considered labour and toil as the only guides to genuine glory, and was content to tolerate on the way the rude fierceness of their manners.