Richard Lepsius, a biography — Story, Setting & Ideas

nner for fourteen days came to seven groschen, a room at the inn for one night was three groschen, a pat (half-pound) of butter was two groschen, three pfennigs. However, the hard-working student seems to have been absolved from this exact rendering of accounts in the third term, but it had been of great advantage to him, for it would have been impossible for him to bring the greatest of his subsequent works to such a successful issue, or indeed to produce them at all, without the strict sense of order which he had acquired both by inheritance and training. For example, after his return from Egypt he was able without the slightest error to join and fit into their proper places the thousands of sheets of paper with which he had taken impressions of the inscriptions. This shows a painstaking exactness in the marking and numbering of each leaf such as had been practised by no previous traveller, not even by Champollion and Rosellini, in whose works errors are by no means rare.

From the first, it was clear to him that he wished to study philology, but he hesitated for some time as to what course he should pursue afterwards. He had presented himself at the proper time, but in those days the professors took things easily. Godfrey Hermann, of whom he had the highest expectations, only began to lecture after Whitsuntide, “most of the others, such as Beck, Rost, Nobbe, Weiske, only at the beginning of June.” The first course of lectures which he attended was Wachsmuth’s “Universal History.” “I was much pleased,” he writes to his father, “with his introduction, in which he expressed his views on the exposition of the general conception, on the division and proper treatment of history. He has besides an agreeable fluent delivery, and a very pleasant voice. Yet his public lectures on Roman History, which followed immediately, were almost more interesting to me. Here his discourse is perfectly unfettered, because he has already laid his foundations in the preceding lectures on Universal History. Roman History is a department to which he has given special attention, and in the treatment of which he repeatedly differs from those views of Niebuhr’s which have introduced a new epoch. On this account it is very interesting to hear him criticise Niebuhr, of whom, however, he speaks with the greatest respect.”

The philosopher Krug he had imagined as quite a different person and much younger. He writes to his father of him: “He has the face of an old philosopher, and it is so beset with solemn wrinkles that at first I could not reconcile it with the biting satirical wit which one finds in his writings. His eyes, however, are very brilliant, and they wander perpetually over the ceiling as if he were unaware of the presence of auditors, during the quiet almost monotonous, but pointed discourse, in which he never blunders or hesitates for a syllable.”

From what might be called the more fortuitous selection of the other courses of lectures which he attended, it is apparent with how little consciousness of his ultimate goal he began his studies, and he makes his father the confidant of his indecision. The interesting letter of the seventh of August, 1829, which we give herewith, shows the young aspirant for the right path in the best light, and proves that he had just discerned in the great philologist, Godfrey Hermann, the man in Leipsic from whom he had most to gain.

Before the end of his first term he writes to his father in this letter: