Ixxviii RICHARD CLEASBY. 1839.

of the Mabinogion, he sailed on the loth of October for Rotterdam, and, making the
acquaintance of Dr. Bosworth, then chaplain in that city, and editor of an Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary, he returned through Holland and Friesland, stopping on his way at
Deventer to see the great Frisian scholar, Dr. Halbertsma :

' A somewhat rigid-looking man, who seemed, in silence, keeping his wife—quite a model of a
Dutch frow—and his two children company.... We talked upon Frisian.... He is about a work on
the language, a complete Dictionary, which I encouraged him to make haste with. He has no
doubt collected such stores as no other man possesses; but I am in general a little afraid of the
speculative nature of his philology, for on my asking him what he considered was the derivation of
the name of the Frisians, he said it was the same word as Persians,—the ^; becomes/", etc., etc., but
I asked him for some connecting links.'

Stopping at Hamburg to see Lappenberg the historian, and at Kiel to have
a chat with his good friend Chalybæus, who had taught him Speculative Theology
at Dresden, and was now professor in the same branch of study in the Holstein
University, he passed on by Eckernförde and Schleswig into that land of the Angela
of which so much was heard in the Schleswig-Holstein controversy, which in those
happy days had hardly begun to lift its horrid head. At Gelting, in the heart of that
district, Cleasby stayed a few days, and made up his mind that

' The basis of the population of Angeln is Danish, mixed, no doubt, a great deal with German
settlers, but whose language was obliged to give way to the predominant one ;.... the names of the
towns, localities, and inhabitants seem a sufficient proof of this, and I am much inclined to doubt
whether the name of the country, " Angle," has anything to do with the Angles who went over to
England with the Saxons, and who sat at the mouth of the Saal or the Elbe, according to the
testimony of Ptolemy.'

On the 2Qth of October he was back at Copenhagen, and was busy greeting his
old friends in that capital, among whom were Professor Molbech, Finn Magnusen,
Ohlenschläger the poet, Brönsted, and Rafn.

Now his Diary is full of his arrangements for taking lodgings, hiring and buying
furniture, preparatory to a lengthened stay in Copenhagen. He was gradually settling
down more and more to Northern studies. lust about this time the old King of

J o

Denmark, Frederick VI, died after a long reign, and was succeeded by his son,
Christian VIII; but Cleasby is more occupied with his books than the royal death
and funeral, on which occasion the population of Copenhagen ' evinced a curiosity and
love of sight-seeing' which ' astonished' him :

' I took the Danes/ he says,' for a more staid and solid people ; high and low, lords and ser-
vants, cookmaids and shoeblacks, all have been up to see these sights—that is, the lying-in-state.'

But Cleasby cares for none of these things. On the 5th of November, nearly a
month before the old king died, comes the following entry in his Diary:—' 4 degrees
heat/—he was always most exact in noting the state of the weather,—' began to read
Icelandic—Sæmund's Edda—with a native Icelander, Giselsen.' This is the first
mention of Konrad Gislason, and for some time longer he is to Cleasby in his Diaries
'Giselsen/ and not Gislason. With him he reads four times a week. But he was
soon to feel that reading Icelandic in those days was to read a language without a