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16
KIEL.
Chap. I.
standing idly gazing around, when my eyes were attracted
by the epitaphium portrait of a young man with the
flowing locks and long guipure tie of the seventeenth
century; one of those melancholy beauties, with a sad
expression of countenance, like Charles I., Cinq Mars,
and a dozen others; sure to die early, so at least one
prophesies 200 years after the event has taken place.
I climbed upon a massive sarcophagus to decipher the
name and lineage of my hero. Hildebrand Count Horn
was his name, born 1625, handsome, accomplished, a
wonderful linguist, sent secretary by Christian IV. to the
embassy at Moscow, later joined the Venetian forces,
and died of his wounds fi^htino- against the Turks in the
island of Cyprus, aged thirty-one. “ Island sacred to
Venus, and a fit burial-place for such a prodigyso
adds the epitaph, dictated, it appears, by his “ mother.”
He is a most interesting looking person, and of a good
Swedish stock, so I advise you if you visit the church of
Kiel to find him out.
That anything remains of the ancient city of Kiel to
me is a wonder; she has been in everlasting hot water
from her youth upwards ; ever disaffected, no matter to
whom she belonged, ready for a row or a revolution, and
not a whit, I fear, now improved in her old age. Her
ancient Holstein counts were an everlasting thorn in
the side of the Danish sovereign. Still, when the old
line wore out, and, untaught by the history of earlier
times, it was reformed anew by the third Christian, her
modern dukes of the younger branch again carried
trouble enough to the tormented house of Oldenborg.
Nor do I consider their own position to have been
an enviable one. Denmark, their suzerain, on one
side, the Emperor and the Hanseatic League on the
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