had seen all things very much as Niebuhr saw them in his sad later days of disgust at revolution and cynical despair of liberty, had come since under the influence of Arnold, and, as his letters to Arnold show, had taken into his own mind much of the more generous and hopeful, though vague, teaching of that equally fervid teacher of liberalism and of religion.  These letters are of much interest.  They show the dreams and the fears and antipathies of the time; they contain some remarkable anticipations, some equally remarkable miscalculations, and some ideas and proposals which, with our experience, excite our wonder that any one could have imagined them practicable.  Every one knows that Bunsen’s diplomatic career at Rome ended unfortunately.  He was mixed up with the violent proceedings of the Prussian Government in the dispute with the Archbishop of Cologne about marriages between Protestants and Catholics, and he had the misfortune to offend equally both his own Court and that of Rome.  It is possible that, as is urged in the biography before us, he was sacrificed to the blunders and the enmities of powers above him.  But, for whatever reason, no clear account is given of the matter by his biographer, though a good deal is suggested; and in the absence of intelligible explanations the conclusion is natural that, though he may have been ill-used, he may also have been unequal to his position.

But his ill-success or his ill-usage at Rome was more than compensated by the results to which it may be said to have led.  Out of it ultimately came that which gave the decisive character to Bunsen’s life—­his settlement in London as Prussian Minister.  On leaving Rome he came straight to England He came full of admiration and enthusiasm to “his Ithaca, his island fatherland,” and he was flattered and delighted by the welcome he received, and by the power which he perceived in himself, beyond that of most foreigners, to appreciate and enjoy everything English.  He liked everything—­people, country, and institutions; even, as his biographer writes, our rooks.  The zest of his enjoyment was not diminished by his keen sense of what appear to foreigners our characteristic defects—­the want of breadth of interest and boldness of speculative thought which accompanies so much energy in public life and so much practical success; and he seems to have felt in himself a more than ordinary fitness to be a connecting link between the two nations—­that he had much to teach Englishmen, and that they were worth teaching.  He thoroughly sympathised with the earnestness and strong convictions of English religion; but he thought it lamentably destitute of rational grounds, of largeness of idea and of critical insight, enslaved to the letter, and afraid of inquiry.  But, with all drawbacks, his visit to England made it a very attractive place to him; and when he was appointed by his Government Envoy to the Swiss Confederation, with strict injunctions “to do nothing,”