AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE.
When, in the year 1832, at Kalkhorst, a village in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, at the age of ten, I presented my father, as a Christmas gift, with a badly written Latin essay upon the principal events of the Trojan war and the adventures of Ulysses and Agamemnon, little did I think that, six-and-thirty years later, I should offer the public a work on the same subject, after having had the good fortune to see with my own eyes the scene of that war, and the country of the heroes whose names have been immortalized by Homer.
As soon as I had learnt to speak, my father related to me the great deeds of the Homeric heroes. I loved these stories; they enchanted me and transported me with the highest enthusiasm. The first impressions which a child receives abide with him during his whole life; and, though it was my lot, at the age of fourteen, to be apprenticed in the warehouse of E. Ludwig Holtz in the small town of Fürstenberg, in Mecklenburg, instead of following the scientific career for which I felt an extraordinary predisposition, I always retained the same love for the famous men of antiquity which I had conceived for them in my first childhood.
In the small shop where I was employed for five years and a half, first by Mr. Holtz and then by his successor, the excellent Mr. Th. Huckstädt, my occupation consisted in retailing herrings, butter, brandy, milk and salt, grinding potatoes for the still, sweeping the shop, and so forth. I only came into contact with the lower classes of society.
From five in the morning to eleven at night I was engaged in this work, and had not a moment free for study. Moreover I rapidly forgot the little that I had learnt in my childhood, but I did not lose the love of learning; indeed I never lost it,
