unknown man, with little more than Niebuhr’s good word, into direct and confidential communication with the King of Prussia, who was then intent on plans of the same kind, and who recognised in Bunsen, after some preliminary jealousy and misgivings, the man most fitted to assist in carrying them out.  But though Bunsen, who started with the resolve of being both a student and a scholar, was driven, as he thought against his will, into paths which led him deeper and deeper into public life and diplomacy, his early plans were never laid aside even under the stress of official employment.  Perhaps it may be difficult to strike the balance of what they lost or gained by it.

The account of his life at Rome contains much that is interesting.  There is the curious mixture of sympathy and antipathy in Bunsen’s mind for the place itself; the antipathy of a German, a Protestant, and a free inquirer, for the Roman, the old Catholic, the narrow, timid, traditional spirit which pervaded everything in the great seat of clerical and Papal government; and the sympathy, scarcely less intense, not merely, or in the first place, for the classical aspects of Rome, but for its religious character, as still the central point of Christendom, full of the memorials and the savour of the early days of Christianity, mingling with what its many centuries of history have added to them; and for all that aroused the interest and touched the mind of one deeply busy with two great religious problems—­the best forms for Christian worship, and the restoration, if possible, of some organisation and authority in Protestant Germany.  For a long time Bunsen, like his master Niebuhr, was on the best terms with Cardinals, Monsignori, and Popes.  The Roman services were no objects to him of abhorrence or indifference.  He saw, in the midst of accretions, the remains of the more primitive devotion; and the architecture, the art, and the music, to be found only in Rome, were to him inexhaustible sources of delight.  As may be supposed, letters like Bunsen’s, and the recollections of his biographer, are full of interesting gossip; notices of famous people, and of things that happened in Rome in the days of the Emancipation and Reform Bills, Revolutions of Naples in ’20 and France in ’30, during the twenty years, from 1818 to 1838, in which the men of the great war and the restorations were going off the scene, and the men of the modern days—­Liberals, High Churchmen, Ultra-montanes—­were coming on.  Those twenty years, of course, were not without their changes in Bunsen’s own views.  The man who had come to Rome, in position a poor and obscure student, had grown into the oracle of a highly cultivated society, whose acquaintance was eagerly sought by every one of importance who lived at Rome or visited it, and into the diplomatic representative of one of the great Powers.  The scholar had come to have, not merely theories, but political and ecclesiastical aims.  The disciple of Niebuhr, who at one time