N BUNSEN[19]

[19]
_A Memoir of Baron Bunsen_. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. _Saturday
Review_, 2nd May 1868.

Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago
than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in
which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet
succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating
English interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and
exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely
important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in
allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal
peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who
has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more
splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But
few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the
_droit de cite_ in England than Bunsen.

It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though
Bunsen's life was a very full and active one in all matters of
intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we
cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater
exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether
too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between
what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and
what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which
biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is
in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving
correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map,
they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other
people's letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end
to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes
advisable. We want types and specimens of a man's letters; and when the
specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for
its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen's early letters are
printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs
were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were
the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself
in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young
man of thoug