o the
whirl of London public life and society, he continued still to be, more
even than the diplomatist, the student and theologian. The Prussian
Embassy during the years that he occupied it, from 1841 to 1854, was
not an idle place, and Bunsen was not a man to leave important State
business to other hands. The French Revolution, the German Revolution,
the Frankfort Assembly, the question of the revival of the Empire, the
beginnings of the Danish quarrel and of the Crimean war, all fell
within that time, and gave the Prussian Minister in such a centre as
London plenty to think of, to do, and to write about. Yet all this time
was a time of intense and unceasing activity in that field of
theological controversy in which Bunsen took such delight. The
diplomatist entrusted with the gravest affairs of a great Power in the
most critical and difficult times, and fully alive to the interest and
responsibility of his charge, also worked harder than most Professors,
and was as positive and fiery in his religious theories and antipathies
as the keenest and most dogmatic of scholastic disputants, he was busy
about Egyptian chronology, about cuneiform writing, about comparative
philology; he plunged with characteristic eagerness into English
theological war; and such books as his _Church of the Future_, and his
writings on Ignatius and Hippolytus, were not the least important of
the works which marked the progress of the struggle of opinions here.
But they represented only a very small part of the unceasing labour
that was going on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace.
All this time the foundations were being laid and the materials
gathered for books of wider scope and more permanent aim, too vast for
him to accomplish even in his later years of leisure. It is an original
and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen who still carry
on the great traditions of scholarship, and give room in their minds
for the deeper and more solemn problems of religion and philosophy,
they are not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously their
public business and their classical or scientific studies, and at any
rate they do not attack the latter with the devouring zeal with which
Bunsen taxed the efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep
pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more of the most
abstruse materials of knowledge.

The end of his London diplomatic career was, like the end of his Roman