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," his eyes were
oft on turned towards England. In 1840 the King of Prussia died, and
Bunsen's friend and patron, the Crown Prince, became Frederic William
IV. He resembled Bunsen in more ways than one; in his ardent religious
sentiment, in his eagerness, in his undoubting and not always
far-sighted self-confidence and self-assertion, and in a combination of
practical vagueness of view and a want of understanding men, with a
feverish imperiousness in carrying out a favourite plan. In 1841 he
sent Bunsen to England to negotiate the ill-considered and precipitate
arrangement for the Jerusalem bishopric; and on the successful
conclusion of the negotiation, Bunsen was appointed permanently to be
Prussian Minister in London. The manner of appointment was remarkable.
The King sent three names to Lord Aberdeen and the English Court, and
they selected Bunsen's.

Thus Bunsen, who twenty-five years before had sat down a penniless
student, almost in despair at the failure of his hopes as a travelling
tutor, in Orgagna's _loggia_ at Florence, had risen, in spite of real
difficulties and opposition, to a brilliant position in active
political life; and the remarkable point is that, whether he was
ambitious or not of this kind of advancement--and it would perhaps
have been as well on his part to have implied less frequently that he
was not--he was all along, above everything, the student and the
theologian. What is even more remarkable is that, plunged int