influenced by contact with contemporary history as men who were less
entirely at home in other centuries. He knew about all that could be
known of the ninth: in the nineteenth his superiority deserted him.
Though he informed himself assiduously his thoughts were not there. He
collected from Hormayr, Radowitz, Capponi, much secret matter of the
last generation; and where Brewer had told him about Oxford, and
Plantier about Louis Philippe, there were landmarks, as when Knoblecher,
the missionary, set down Krophi and Mophi on his map of Africa. He
deferred, at once, to the competent authority. He consulted his able
colleague Hermann on all points of political economy, and used his
advice when he wrote about England. Having satisfied himself, he would
not reopen these questions, when, after Hermann's death, he spent some
time in the society of Roscher, a not less eminent economist, and of all
men the one who most resembled himself in the historian's faculty of
rethinking the thoughts and realising the knowledge, the ignorance, the
experience, the illusions of a given time.

He had lived in many cities, and had known many important men; he had
sat in three parliamentary assemblies, had drawn constitutional
amendments, had been consulted upon the policy and the making of
ministries, and had declined political office; but as an authority on
recent history he was scarcely equal to himself. Once it became his duty
to sketch the character of a prince whom he had known. There was a
report that this sovereign had only been dissuaded from changing his
religion and abolishing the constitution by the advice of an archbishop
and of a famous parliamentary jurist; and the point of the story was
that the Protestant doctrinaire had prevented the change of religion,
and the archbishop had preserved the constitution. It was too early to
elucidate these court mysteries; instead of which there is a remarkable
conversation about religion, wherein it is not always clear whether the
prince is speaking, or the professor, or Schelling.

Although he had been translated into several languages and was widely
known in his own country, he had not yet built himself a European name.
At Oxford, in 1851, when James Mozley asked whom he would like to see,
he said, the men who had written in the _Christian Remembrancer_ on
Dante and Luther. Mozley was himself one of the two, and he introduced
him to the other at Oriel. After thirty-two years, when the writer