and affectionate esteem, whose ardour neither time nor distance could
diminish. The filial affection of her favourite son soothed the declining
years of his mother, and lightened the anxieties with which the critical
and troubled state of the times alarmed her old age. His further education
was carried on by a private tutor, who prepared him for the grammar-school
at Hanover, where he was distinguished both for his unremitting
application, to which he often sacrificed the hours of leisure and
recreation, and for the early display of a natural gift for language,
which enabled him immediately on the close of his academic career to
accept a tutorial appointment, which demanded of its holder a knowledge
not only of the classics but also of English and French. He also displayed
at a very early age a talent for poetry, and some of his juvenile
extempore effusions were remarkable for their easy versification and
rhythmical flow. In his eighteenth year he was called upon to deliver in
the Lyceum of his native city, the anniversary oration in honour of a
royal birthday. His address on this occasion excited an extraordinary
sensation both by the graceful elegance of the style and the interest of
the matter, written in hexameters. It embraced a short history of poetry
in Germany, and was relieved and animated with many judicious and striking
illustrations from the earliest Teutonic poets.

He now proceeded to the University of Gottingen as a student of theology,
which science, however, he shortly abandoned for the more congenial one of
philology. The propriety of this charge he amply attested by his Essay on
the Geography of Homer, which displayed both an intelligent and
comprehensive study of this difficult branch of classical archaeology.

At Gottingen he lived in the closest intimacy with Heyne, for whose
_Virgil_, in 1788 he completed an index; he also became acquainted
with the celebrated Michaelis. It was here too that he formed the