All things considered, it would have been difficult for the Duke of Coburg to make a better choice of a University in which to give his sons the last finishing touch of education. Bonn has always stood high as a home of learning. King Frederick William III. was careful, with the most luxurious buildings and what was at that time considered a truly princely endowment, to bestow upon his own peculiar "pet child" as competent a teaching staff as money and favour could procure. And in 1837, though Niebuhr was gone, and Arndt was suspended--for preaching too vigorously the gospel of German union, which was then reputed rank heresy--and though Dahlmann, who would have been a professor after Prince Albert's own heart, had not yet come, the teaching staff could compare with that of any period. But apart from that, there was a tone of freedom and geniality prevailing at Bonn which distinguished that place from all other German universities. It was the least Prussian of all Prussian High Schools--far more in the world and in touch with the world than all its sisters. Set up on "Frankish" soil, which used to give Germany its Emperors; the chosen residence, until recently, of prelates of an ancient See, who had entertained relations from time immemorial with all great Courts, and who had been recruited from princely houses; and, last, but not least, only a generation before an integral portion of the Republic, "one and indivisible," which planted its tricolor nowhere without leaving its free spirit behind, even after the outward ensign was gone--Bonn nourished a more independent habit of thought and encouraged wider and larger views than did the "zopf"-ruled universities of the East. It was here, doubtless, among the patriotic aspirations of a "Young Germany" unchilled by Carlsbad and Laibach, under the inspiring teaching of Arndt, that Duke Ernest, prophetically styled _Spes patriæ_ in an address presented by the Academical Senate, conceived that liberal, high-minded and unselfish policy which paved the way as much as anything else for the Union of 1871. And to Prince Albert, likewise, this must have seemed a wider world than that of Coburg; and, in a period of life more formative of character than any other, it must have served to prepare him better for that freer sphere of action into which he was destined shortly to be called.