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 into 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