Page:Essay on the mineral waters of Carlsbad (1835).pdf/34

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
30
 

with foreigners. Of late he has made astonishing progress in the danish language. In 1827, he undertook the turk, without any teacher but Viguier’s Grammar, and the various turkish books he found afterwards in the public libraries of Prague and Vienna. Having met with insurmountable difficulties of admission in the Oriental Academy of Vienna, he tried jurisprudence; but seeing that neither the law nor the turkish language could lead him to any favourable result, he devoted himself to medecine, and took his degrees at Prague, on the 10th of March 1835. The best proof that he has not neglected oriental languages is the double turkish version of Lobkowitz’s Ode on Carlsbad, which he gave me, in April 1831. Having asked him leave of submitting both to Mr. de Hammer’s judgement, who himself, two years before, had declined to translate it at my request, as too difficult, the great orientalist of Vienna answered that „Pfitzmayer’s versions were admirable; that I could without any scruple print them in my Polyglot, etc.“ Augustus Pfitzmayer’s beginning Life, his two versions and Mr, de Hammer’s answers, are published in my Almanach de Carlsbad, 1832, ch. XVIII.

(⁵) Peter I, czar of Russia, came twice to Carlsbad, towards the end of October 1711 and 1712, and the last elective king of Poland, Stanislas Poniatowski, drank our waters, during the winter of 1761, viz. three years before his election.