one, clouded with something like disgrace; and, like the Roman one, is
left here unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his
residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his
early notions about England, political and theological at least,
gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what
at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides
knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased
his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old
kindness for it, by looking at it only from a distance. The labour of
his later days, as vast and indefatigable as that of his earlier days,
was devoted to his great work, which was, as it were, to popularise the
Bible and revive interest in it by a change in the method of presenting
it and commenting on it. To the last the Bible was the central point of
his philosophical as well as his religious thoughts, as it had been in
his first beginnings as a student at Gottingen and Rome. After a life
of many trials, but of unusual prosperity and enjoyment, he died in the
end of 1860. The account of his last days is a very touching one.

We do not pretend to think Bunsen the great and consummate man that,
naturally enough, he appears to his friends. We doubt whether he can be
classed as a man in the first rank at all. We doubt whether he fully
understood his age, and yet it is certain that he was confident and
positive that he did understand it better than most men; and an undue
confidence of this kind implies considerable defects both of intellect
and character. He wanted the patient, cautious, judicial self-distrust
which his studies eminently demanded, and of which he might have seen
some examples in England. No one can read these volumes without seeing
the disproportionate power which first impressions had with him; he was
always ready to say that something, which had just happened or come
before him, was the greatest or the most complete thing of its kind.
Wonderfully active, wonderfully quick and receptive, full of
imagination and of the power of combining and constructing, and never
wearied out or dispirited, his mind took in large and grand ideas, and
developed them with enthusiasm and success, and with all the resources
of wide and varied knowledge; but the affluence and ingenuity of his
thoughts indisposed him, as it indisposes many other able men, to the
prosaic and uninteres