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Heinrich von Sybel, in his academic address delivered at Bonn in 1868, says: "The excellence of our universities is to be found in the fact that they are not mere institutions where instruction is given, but are workshops of science that their vital principle is unceasing scientific productivity.
Coming after Sybel, he is somewhat ahead of him in documentary resource. He is more friendly to the principles of the Revolution, without being an apologist, and is more cheerful, more sanguine, and pleasanter to read. A year ago I said that, Sybel and Taine being dead, Sorel is our highest living authority. To-day I can no longer use those words.
I mentioned the reputation Von Sybel enjoyed in Germany as having an excellent style, and the response was, "Very likely: where all the rest are blind a one-eyed man sees very well" a remark true enough as regards the mass of German writers, but very unjust to the person under discussion. Taine's models are Macaulay and Froude, but one would hardly think so from reading his France contemporaine.
Liebig of Munich, Ranke of Berlin, Sybel of Bonn, Ewald of Göttingen, Mommsen in Berlin, Döllinger in Munich, and such men as Schiemann in Berlin to-day, were and are, not only scholars, but they have been and are political teachers; some of them violently reactionary, if you please, but all of them stirring men to think.
One day, after I had been reading Lanfrey's ``Histoire de Napol<e'>on, which I then thought, and still think, one of the most eloquent and instructive books of the nineteenth century, Von Sybel happened to drop in, and I asked his opinion of it.
Dinner being now finished, and after some conversation, which must of course be of a very local description, although it is brightened with many a quiet touch of wit, of which the natives possess a great original fund, and Melancthon, having finished in the forenoon harrowing in his buck-wheat, has now gone with his axe to hew at a house-frame which he has in preparation, and Sybèl and I having settled our affair of warp and woof, it is now time for me to proceed.
In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted himself to special and original research to "science" as Von Sybel uses the term and whose discoveries and works give strength and increase of dignity to the university with which he is connected. He is appointed upon his merits as a discoverer or an author.
The Moderate Liberals, men like Sybel, had always been opposed to universal suffrage; even the English statesmen were alarmed; it was two years before Disraeli made his leap in the dark, and here was the Prussian statesman making a far bolder leap in a country not yet accustomed to the natural working of representative institutions.
What he revealed was so decisive that it obliged Sybel to rewrite what he had written on the scenes of September. When I describe the real study of the Revolution as beginning with Tocqueville and Ternaux, I mean the study of it in the genuine and official sources. Memoirs, of course, abounded. There are more than a hundred. But memoirs do not supply the certainty of history.
Professor Sybel was not one of Reeve's frequent correspondents, and the following extract is from the only letter of his which has been preserved, probably the only one ever written.
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