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[75] serve only as the foundation of a public walk, shaded with fine trees, which extends round the city. The number of inhabitants is about ten thousand, and, as far as I have come in contact with them during the last three days, I have found them as all the Germans are reputed to be,—kind, courteous, and not only willing, but anxious, to assist the strangers who come among them. One circumstance, I believe, must strike everybody who establishes himself at Gottingen: it is a place which subsists so entirely upon literature, the town and the University have been by the policy of the government so completely adapted to the wants of foreigners, and the manners and habits of the citizens and faculty so entirely accommodated to this fluctuating population, that the moment a student comes here, his situation is so well understood that every request and wish is anticipated. Wherever you go, it seems to be the express business of the persons you meet,—whether they be professors, faculty, or citizens, —to see that you are in lodgings, that you know the persons whom you ought to choose for instructors, and that you are properly furnished with everything you want. In consequence of this, a student can hardly feel himself to be a stranger here, after the first day or two.

The University, as you know, was founded by George II., and was always under the especial patronage of the British throne, until Hanover was seized by the French. Ever since then it has shared a better fate than the other literary establishments of the Continent. Bonaparte, indeed, once sent Denon, the Egyptian traveller, and another savant, to look among the treasures of its Library, but they carried nothing away. While Halle, Leipsic, and Jena were suffering under his brutal depredations on their funds and among their books, he declared that he considered Gottingen as an establishment which belonged neither to Hanover nor to Germany, but to Europe and the world; and he was not only true to the promise he made to the faculty here, to protect them, but, under the government of Jerome, they were liberally assisted by the influence and even the wealth of the throne. In consequence of this, Gottingen, instead of coming from the hands of the French nearly abolished, like the universities of Holland, or mutilated and abridged in its funds and privileges, like those of Saxony, now stands higher than it ever stood before, and at this moment—when an immense proportion of the young men of the country are in the ranks of the army, from choice or compulsion, and all the other literary establishments, even those at Halle, Leipsic, and Berlin, are languishing for want of pupils—reckons on its books


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