Ixii RICHARD CLEASBY.

stayed a while to practise himself in French, and then crossed the Alps into Italy,
where he settled down at Florence, and spent more than two years in the study of
the ancient languages, and of Italian, in which he acquired such mastery as both to
speak and write it with fluency and elegance, as draughts of letters in Italian still
remaining among his correspondence abundantly testify. About the year 1830 he
recrossed the Alps, and established himself at Munich, where he worked indefatigably
both at philology and philosophy under Schelling, then the great master of the tran-
scendental school, who had caught the torch of thought as it fell from the dying
hand of Kant. In philology, Massmann and Schmeller, well known as the author
of the Dictionary on the Dialects of Bavaria, were his teachers; but in the first
period of his residence at Munich, philosophy rather than philology seems to have been
the object which he had in view, and the earlier volumes of the copious Diaries which he
kept from this time to his death, and which are now before the writer of this notice, are
full of notes of Schelling's lectures, who possessed a greater power of fascinating his
pupils even than his great rival, Hegel himself. But though he worked faithfully and
laboriously at his philosophy, that regular practical mind was not one to sink itself
altogether in cobweb speculations on German metaphysics. Philology afforded
him a firmer footing, and, having once taken his stand on that rock of learning, he
clung to it to the end. For several years he remained abroad, deaf to the entreaties
of his friends to return home, pursuing his favourite study in all parts of Germany,
which he visited now on foot, and now on horseback, until there was no district to which
he had not penetrated, and no dialect over which he had not attained a mastery. His
acquirements in this respect were well known to the great German scholars, now dead
and gone. Schmeller, his old teacher, had the greatest respect for his judgment, as
is shewn by his letters among Richard Cleasby's correspondence; and Jacob Grimm
told the writer, in the year 1844, ^{tnat no one} knew the dialects of Germany, as a whole,
more profoundly than Cleasby. ' Some of us/ he said, ' know one or two dialects better,
but Richard Cleasby knows them all, as his leisure and means have allowed him to
traverse the country in every direction and make them his own.'

But though thus laborious in the pursuit of knowledge, it must not be supposed
that Richard Cleasby was a mere bookworm. The same Diaries which attest his
unwearying efforts to acquire knowledge are filled with passages which prove his keen
enjoyment of society and his delight in the natural beauties of the countries in which
he was from time to time a sojourner. He was never so happy as when, after months
of patient study, he broke away with some congenial companion from Leipzig or
Dresden, or from Munich, the capital of his choice, to take a pedestrian tour in Saxon
Switzerland or in the Bavarian Tyrol. In later years, after he had settled down in
Denmark, he sought relaxation from his philological labours in the smiling neighbour-
hood of Copenhagen, and, as he is careful to note the fall of the first winter's snow and
the pinching cold of Yule, so in the early spring the first chirping of the chaffinch and
the coming of the welcome swallow are not lost upon him. With literary men his
acquaintance both in Germany and the North was most extensive, and it may safely*