Not long after this event he departed from Constantinople, honoured with distinguished marks of respect both by the sultan and the grand vizier, and sincerely regretted by his brother ambassadors, and all the French established in the Levant. Being unable to return to France, he retired to Russia, where Catherine, who, as I have already had frequent occasion to observe, was an excellent judge of men, received him in the most flattering manner, and afforded him the most honourable protection. Paul I., on his accession to the throne, distinguished him by new favours, nominated him privy counsellor, director of the academy of arts and of all the imperial libraries, and also gave him many other solid proofs of his esteem. The favour of a madman, however, was necessarily liable to change. The Comte de Cobentzel, with whom Choiseul-Gouffier had lived on very intimate terms, falling into disgrace, he was uncourtly enough to continue the connexion; which so displeased Paul, that our traveller considered it unsafe to remain at court, and retired. No longer seeing his old favourite about him, the imperial lunatic commanded him to return, and upon his approach remarked, in a friendly tone, “M. le Count, there are stormy cloudy days in which it rains misunderstandings; we have experienced one of these; but as we are men of understanding, we have shaken it off, and are only upon the better footing.”
Our traveller, who no doubt saw clearly enough the state of the emperor’s head, and dreaded his relapse into ill-humour, very quickly determined to return to France; where he at length arrived in 1802, stripped of his titles and fortune, and reduced to rely upon his literary rank for distinction. He, however, sought for no office or employment. All his thoughts were now directed towards the completion of his work on his beloved Greece, and during seven years he laboured assiduously at this agreeable undertaking. Other travellers had in the mean while visited and described the same countries; his ideas and views were regarded as antiquated; the interest inspired by his first volume, published twenty-seven years before, had in a great measure ceased; and, more than all this, he himself, worn down by misfortunes, sobered by long adversity, and somewhat unaccustomed to the art of composition, was no longer the same naïve, lively author that he had been. He now gave himself up to geographical disquisitions, learned dissertations, and geological remarks. Homer himself, though still his favourite, had undergone a transformation in his eyes. Losing sight of the poet, the matchless painter of human nature, he was satisfied with admiring him as an historian and geographer.
Nevertheless there still remained a mixture of the old leaven in his composition. The sight of the rose harvest near Adrianople in Thrace reawakened all his enthusiasm, and his description of the festival with which it closes, in which the beautiful Grecian girls perform so elegant and classical a part, would certainly not disgrace the pages of Theocritus or Virgil. The completion of the third volume (or rather the 2d part of the second) seems to have been retarded, among other causes, by the composition of several memoirs for the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, on the Olympian Hippodrome, on the origin of the Thracian Bosphorus, and on the personal existence of Homer, which has been called in question by several critics more learned than wise.
Before the completion of his work, however, he was seized with an apoplectic fit, which made his friends despair of his life. He was advised to make trial of the waters of Aix-la-Chapelle, whither he removed, accompanied by the Princess de Bauffremont, his second wife. Here he died on the 22d of June, 1817. It was now feared by all those who had properly appreciated his labours, that the concluding portion of his work, without which the former parts would be comparatively valueless, might never appear; but a publisher was at length found to undertake the expensive and hazardous enterprise. He purchased from the Princess de Bauffremont all the papers, charts, drawings, engravings, and copper-plates of her deceased husband, and with a taste, zeal, and industry for which the arts are indebted to him, completed the “Voyage Pittoresque de la Grèce” in a style worthy of the commencement. The portrait of the Comte de Choiseul, which M. Blaise, the publisher, caused to be engraved by a distinguished French artist, is a masterpiece of its kind; but there still remain many splendid drawings, and several valuable maps and charts of various parts of Greece, which may some day, perhaps, be published as a supplement, or in a second edition, should it be called for by the public.
JOHN LEWIS BURCKHARDT.
Born 1784.—Died 1817.
This traveller, descended from an eminent family of Basle, in Switzerland, was born at Lausanne, in 1784. He was the eighth child of John Rodolph Burckhardt, whose prospects in life were early blighted by his adherence to the Austrian faction during the troubles in Switzerland, consequent upon the French revolution. Our traveller, led by hereditary prejudices to nourish an aversion for republican principles, or too young and hot-headed not to confound the agents with the cause, imbibed at a very early age a detestation for the French, at that period regarded as the representatives of republicanism; and, with the same spirit which induced Pietro della Valle to engage in a crusade against the Turks, he wished to serve in the armies of some nation at war with France. These wishes, however, were the mere hallucinations of a boy, or an echo of the sentiments which he heard uttered by others. His education had not been completed: his notions were necessarily crude, and he had neither discovered nor learned from others the paramount importance of freedom, without which even national independence is a vain possession.
Burckhardt’s studies were, from various causes, conducted in the manner best calculated to create and nourish restless and adventurous habits. Having received the first rudiments of his education in his father’s house, he was removed to a school at Neufchatel, where he remained two years. At the age of sixteen he was entered a student at the university of Leipzig; from whence, after four years’ residence, he proceeded to Göttingen, where he continued another year. He then returned to his parents. The natural firmness and consistency of his character, of which his countenance was strikingly expressive, still taught him to keep alive his hatred of the French; but no continental nation had preserved itself wholly free from the influence of this people; and therefore, rejecting an offer which was made him by one of the petty courts of Germany, desirous of numbering him among its diplomatic body, he turned his thoughts towards England, which, like a separate world, had remained inviolate from the tread of the enemy. Accordingly, having provided himself with letters of introduction to several persons of distinction, among which was one from Professor Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks, he set out for London, where he arrived in the month of July, 1806.
This step was the pivot upon which the whole circle of his short life was destined to turn. His introduction to Sir Joseph Banks, who had long been an active member of the African Association, almost necessarily brought him into contact with several other individuals connected with that celebrated society; and conversations with these persons, whose motives were at least respectable, and whose enthusiasm was unbounded, naturally begot in Burckhardt a corresponding warmth, and transformed him, from a Quixotic crusader against the French, into an ardent, ambitious traveller.
It should not be dissembled that, upon Burckhardt’s desire to travel for the African Association being communicated to Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Hamilton (then acting secretary to that body), strong representations of the dangers to be encountered in the execution of the plan were made to the youthful aspirant after fame; but such representations, which are a delusive kind of peace-offering placed for form’s sake on the altar of conscience, are seldom sincerely designed to effect their apparent purpose; and the actors in the farce would, for the most part, experience extreme chagrin should they find their eloquence prove successful. At all events, few men are so ignorant as not to know that the aspect of danger wears a certain charm for youth, which naturally associates therewith an idea of honour; and, provided success be probable, or even possible, reckons obstacles of every kind among the incentives to exertion. These dissuasive speeches, therefore, from persons whose sole object in constituting themselves into a public body was to produce a directly opposite result, were altogether hypocritical; and Burckhardt, if he possessed half the sagacity which seems to have entered into his character, must have distinctly perceived this, and have despised them accordingly.