write, fish, and, except when I saw a friend, forget there was a world where fools thrive, and wise men are driven wild by seeing it; a world where -8 play first fiddles, and MacDonnells and Magees play hurdy-gurdies; I had sooner stroll about the fields among green corn and sheep than live among green evangelicals and see them worshipping calves. All this, however, would not stir your bile as it would and does mine. You are a smooth man, and I will get through the world happily; I am a hairy man, and am dragged through the world wrong end foremost, so that my hair is all on end.

That passage gives the secret of many of the trials of his life. It is one of many which resemble it. He was needlessly impatient and needlessly bitter. Such passages as the following are less sympathetic in tone than could be desired:

I saw, this afternoon, the grand procession of the Radical clubs and unions to a monster meeting in Hyde Park against "coercion." It was very instructive. The multitude of small, undersized, citizen-like youths and men-some fierce and proud, some evidently half ashamed of the whole thing, some evidently regarding it as a jolly lark-the tawdry banners, the flashy mottoes, the dismal bands, and the utterly indifferent spectators-all combined with the knowledge that the gathering would go off quietly, and have not the least effect on the mind of that public which still governs-all so unlike anything that could happen in any country save England; all so contemptible now, and yet all so fraught with elements of danger for the futurestruck me greatly.

Or take these very trenchant remarks:

The boorish voter who sustained that aristocracy and squirearchy was dull and impassive, and open to bribery and beer; but he was stolid and bovine, and never got into a fury except against the pope. But your modern, half-taught, newspaperreading, platform-haunting, discussionclub frequenter, conceited, excitable, nervous product of modern town artisan life, is a most dangerous animal. He loves rant and cant and fustian, and loves too the power for the masses that all this rant

and cant is aiming at, and he seems to be rapidly becoming the great ruling power in England.

Or again, on a different subject:

How sick I am of speaking, preaching, talking, and working generally! How I long for the side of a trout stream, or a boat on Loch Imagh, with no letters, no after-thoughts, no nothink.

Surely Cakya Mouni, the great founder of Buddhism, must have been a bishop of some sort when he invented the heaven of Nirvana. Even lotus-eating must have been the idea of some sore worried Greek priest, who had probably to attend many temple "restorations" and take part in many processions, and had Greek Wto manage, and dreamed one night of "the land where it is always afternoon." Alas for me! my lotus just now is quinine, and my ague fit comes on regularly each afternoon, in spite of the said quinine.

And to quote but one more of these recurring outbursts:

What a hornet's nest he brings about his ears who does not "let things be," however bad they are, but must needs try to mend them! He gets all the stings, and any honey going goes to those who give him neither thanks for the honey nor pity for the stings.

Dr. Magee incessantly complained of "misrepresentation," "outrageous travesties," and so forth, and alludes again and again to Church newspapers, with their reams of abuse and attack. But to endure all those "hurricanes of callumny and tornadoes of abuse," as Mr. John Bright called them, is the most ordinary lot even of quite humble public men, who have none of the solatia which fell to the archbishop, and who have said and done nothing to provoke such animosity. He would have been wiser not to read the attacks. When a man is conscious of his own utter sincerity and integrity, he can do nothing better than to "get the thing done, and let them howl." There can be no wiser rule for a man who regards it as his sacred duty boldly to speak the truth and shame the devil. and constantly to take the unpopular side, than those words inscribed on

the Marischal College at "They haif said; quhat say they? lat them say." A man need not be so "hair-sore" as the bishop said he was, if he will simply follow the two rules: "Doe the next thynge," and

Lascia dir le genti:

Sta come torre ferma, che non crolla
Giammai la cima per soffiar de' venti.1

But as he often spoke slightingly, and even contemptuously, of others, he should have been less astonished if he, too, had to bear his share of misapprehension. He was often lacerated by the “Sæva indignatio," and could mentally describe an opponent as an "unmitigated ass," and cauterize those who honestly differed from him (and were often in the right) with scathing epithets. Yet, unfortunately,

he was but little able to bear criticism himself. It is a great pity that some of his splendid outbursts are here printed, and applied to good men still living, or only recently dead. He might speak of the clergy en masse, without greatly hurting any one's feelings, as when he wrote.

Truly we are coming very fast to the condition in which Captain Parolles represented the duke's army as being, when he said that there were ten thousand of them; but that one half of them "dare not shake the snow from off their cassocks lest they shake themselves to pieces!"

I am beginning almost to long, I have been for some time looking, for Disestablishment. It will very nearly drown us; but it will kill the fleas.

Or, when a bishopric was vacant:

Deans A and B are ordering a pair of lawn sleeves between them, the winner to pay. Their wives are cautioning their daughters not to be too familiar with curates. I have an application for the agency of the See of Limerick. I wonder, do the parasites on the hind legs of a blue

These disparagements are impartially general; but personalities should have been omitted. It is painful to read of a truly great and good archbishop the unkind remark that "he regarded the clergy as a big sixth form;" or to hear one of the most lovable of deans called "a strangely fascinating, sad, solitary piece of Church history;" or the eminent clerical scholar who presided over an Oxford college described as a freethinker, and "the mummy of an opium-eater restored to life and dressed in the dinner-dress of the nineteenth century;" and of a great preacher as "a man of feminine mind," and "a monk in petticoats;" and of another good and humble bishop as "poking his small person into a strife which he does not understand and is not equal to." It is still more objectionable to print Dr. Magee's opinion of a living dean as "the Cleon of the Lower House;" and of a living bishop as "inopportune and mischievous in the most saintly way," who "pressed upon us a heap of sweetly solemn platitudes, such as he alone can indite, and such as he alone believes can be of the slightest use to man, woman, or child." Such remarks might be made, harmlessly enough, in familiar conversation, or written in the case of confidential letters, but it is a very different matter to preserve them in print, and it is hoped that in future editions they may be expunged, or the names omitted.

The reader will gain from these pages some proof that the life of a bishop is very far indeed from being a bed of roses. The bishop writes at various times:

Or, once more:

Our clergy here [he wrote in 1872] are like an angry swarm of bees in defence of

1 Dante, "Purgatorio," v. 13-15.

I had a return of a bad cold yesterday' morning-preached with two pocket handkerchiefs to a great congregation at St. Mary's, ate a "cold collation" as 3 o'clock, saw clergy on business until 5 o'clock, went to a "parochial tea" at 6 o'clock; sat

out no end of tea, glees, and speeches, until 9.30; finished off with a speech until 10 o'clock; came here very bad with cold, took chlorodyne, and went to bed very miserable; woke next morning quite well. Went over the Infirmary, sat out a three hours' public meeting, attended a two hours' Church Extension committee meet

ing, talked with clergy till 5 o'clock, had my dinner, and am off now to an evening meeting. Such is the easy, luxurious life we bloated prelates lead.

Ye gentlemen in curacies who sit at home at ease How little do ye think upon the labors of our sees.

I am still in the midst of a Confirmation tour, which will not end until next week. The week after I have to preach before the queen; and nearly every day after that, for five weeks, I have to preach or speak somewhere or other, until June 18, when I hope to get away for my summer holidays.

You may see from this at what a pace we "bloated and indolent" English prelates are living. I doubt if any one of us will live as bishop ten years.

God knows, and he only, how I hate patronage. It is the most anxious, thankless, and disappointing duty that any man can be called on to perform.

He is certain to disappoint nineteen out of twenty eligible men, and then it is twenty to one that the twentieth disappoints him!

Canon MacDonnell accuses me of harping on the too famous remark of Magee (in his speech of May 2, 1872). It was universally quoted in the press that "he preferred to see England free to England sober." With all explanations I still regard it as involving a disastrous sophism, a dangerous error in judgment and a most false antithesis. But I have never harped on it. So far as I can remember, I only once publicly tried to expose its falsity, in a speech delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. I did so because I had devoted my utmost efforts to awaken the conscience of my fellow-countrymen to realize the deadliness of a curse which Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons described as more pernicious than those of war, famine, and pesti

we

had

lence combined; and because at every turn the drinksellers were flouting us with this epigram, which, whatever may have been the intention of the speaker, dangerously dazzled and deceived the multitude. "If you did not understand the grounds of my objection to the Permissive Bill," wrote the bishop to Canon MacDonnell, “it is clear that multitudes besides must have misunderstood it too." For myself, I never did misunderstand it; but, having once endeavored to show its error, I left it alone. Bishop Magee disproportionately was bitterly and offended by my perfectly fair and honest criticism, and whereas been on cordial terms, he suddenly became cold and hostile without telling me the reason till years later. I then ventured to say to him, very much more plainly than I here write, how far better it would have been if he had at once let me know that he had taken offence. In that case he would have received from me, by return of post, an expression of the most sincere regret if, however unwittingly, I had misrepresented his meaning and wounded his sensitiveness. Nothing would have pleased me more than to give any explanation which he desired of what had been his real meaning. He himself afterwards regretted the form in which he had expressed his meaning; and, in later years, owing to circumstances to which I will not allude, he became entirely friendly, and ceased to speak of me with disdainful anger and contemptuous epithets. I believe that the last sermon which he preached in London was preached at my church by my request. Mr. Gladstone was present, and spoke of it as one of the finest sermons he had ever heard. That day the bishop-it was just before he became Archbishop of York-dined with us, and the Archbishop of Armagh, then Bishop of Derry, was our other guest. He described the sermon as worthy in parts of Bossuet. I had first made the acquaintance of both when one was Dean of Cork and the other Dean of Emly, and I happened to sit between

them on the platform at the Church Congress in Dublin in 1868. The Dean of Cork, as he then was, spoke to me most kindly about the paper I had read, and himself made a speech upon it. The last time I saw him was at the Athenæum, almost immediately before his death, when, in radiant spirits, he thanked me heartily for my congratulations on his recent promotion to the Archbishopric of York, which threw a vivid gleam of happiness upon his closing days, and had, as he expressed it, "given him 'quite a new lease of life."'" He was not exempt from those faults which mark all men, even the best; but he was a good as well as an eminent man, and in these volumes may be found many arguments and opinions of great and permanent value on important subjects. There were some of his public lines of action with which I cannot honestly express any agreement; but his endeavor to procure legal protection for the tormented children of bad parents is one of many efforts for which he deserves all gratitude and praise.

Dr.

When Archbishop Tait was ill in 1869 Archbishop Magee wrote: "Who and what a Gladstonian archbishop would be, if he resigned or died, God only knows." But the "Gladstonian archbishop" in 1882 was Dr. Benson, the beloved and saintly prelate who has just been taken from us. Magee had himself pointed out his fitness, and with great prescience indiIcated the line he would take if chosen. He wrote: "All things considered, age especially, he would, perhaps, prove the best for the Church. He would certainly unite and lead the Episcopate better than the Bishop of Durham." I believe that the recognition of Dr. Benson's goodness and of his rare qualities of head and heart will grow as time goes on. Although I had known him ever since we were undergraduates-he was only a little senior to me at Trinity College, Cambridge, I never got to love him more, or set a higher value on his private character and public services, than during the last eighteen months. As the old

palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury was pulled down by the Puritans in 1558, the archbishops have now no palace at Canterbury, and practically use the Deanery as their palace during their visits, three times a year or oftener, to the premier cathedral. I had never before witnessed SO closely the sunny charm and geniality of fatherliness and brotherliness which characterized his demeanor to all with whom he was thrown, from the greatest of bores down to the most delightful of companions, and from the oldest bedesman of eighty down to the youngest choir-boy of eleven. This "sweetness and light," this power of making himself universally beloved, was undoubtedly a great help to him in his public work. And how admirable had been his career! Gifted, both as a youth and as a man, with great personal comeliness, he always seemed to win all hearts. As a boy at school, he had not only had a stainless character, but was happy in the friendship of two other boys, who remained his lifelong intimates-the late Dr. Lightfoot, Bishop of Durham, and the present Bishop of Durham, Dr. Westcott. Even as boys they were seriously and unfeignedly religious. It is a proud thing for Birmingham School, and for their head master, Dr. Prince Lee, the first Bishop of Manchester, to have trained at the same time three boys, who, though very much unlike each other, grew up to be among the foremost prelates and greatest theologians of their age. Dr. Lightfoot and Dr. Westcott have rendered inestimable services to the elucidation of the text and interpretation of the New Testament. Dr. Benson was, if a less deep, yet, perhaps, an even more graceful scholar than either of them. He was fitted for his high position by his thorough knowledge of and interest in cathedral life, and in all branches of liturgical, ecclesiastical, and archæological lore. He also possessed remarkable tact and practical ability, large-hearted tolerance, genuine sympathy with men who differed from him, and a quiet force of

persuasive influence. And how bright and useful were his labors! He became Chancellor's Medallist at Cambridge, and Scholar and Fellow of his college. There have been few more brilliant writers of Latin and Greek verse than he. His version of Gray's "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat," written in the Medal Examinations, became quite famous for its felicity. Probably the last Latin elegiacs which he ever wrote were written at my request, to place under the opus sectile memorial of Bishop Phillips Brooks in St. Margaret's church. They were as follows:

Fervidus eloquio, sacra doctissimus arte,

Suadendi gravibus vera Deumque viris, Quæreris ab sedem populari voce regendam,

Quæreris-ab sedem rapte domumque

Dei.

They were rendered by his poet son, Mr. Arthur Benson:

preaching to the boys in the temporary chapel, and meeting them at his hospitable table, I saw how kind he was, yet how firm; and how naturally he won the affection of his pupils. He then became canon and chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, and by the singular success and felicity of his work there evinced his fitness for the arduous post of founding the new cathedral and organizing the new diocese of Truro. At Truro again he won the hearts of all the Cornishmen. When Archbishop Tait died he was at once one of those who were marked out by the popular voice as likely to succeed him. What his primacy was, how deep and real were the services which he was enabled to render to the Church of England and of Wales in dangerous crises, how indefatigable were his self-denying labors, how conciliatory his tone, how firm his principles, how large his tolerance, how munificent his generosity both to rich

October 16, he was laid in his honored

heart;

To feed the flock: thy people's choice was given

Required on earth, but ah! preferred to heaven.

The career of the late archbishop was indeed enviable. After a short spell of work under Dr. Goulburn, as an assistant-master at Rugby, he attracted the favorable notice of the prince consort, and while quite a young man was chosen the first headmaster of Wellington College, which was one of the memorials of Arthur, Duke of Wellington. To start a new school nobly and successfully is a Herculean task; but no one could have achieved it more admirably than Dr. Benson. He stamped all the institutions of the college with his own individuality, gave it the motto Heroum Filii, and, in the words of his son,

taught the sons of hero sires To be the sires of hero sons. Visiting the college, as his guest, at an early stage of its career, and

the Reformed Church of England to be interred in Canterbury Cathedral, in which repose the remains of the great majority of the previous primates down to Cardinal Pole, who died in 1559. The Duke of York, as representative of H.M. the queen; Prince Charles of Denmark; the representative of the German emperor, and of almost every member of the royal family were present and laid wreaths or floral tributes on his grave. Two archbishops, more than thirty bishops, several headmasters of our great public schools, some judges and literary men, more than three hundred clergy, the mayor and corporation of Canterbury; the mayors of other towns; the commandants and many officers of the soldiers at Canterbury and Dover; delegates from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Dublin, from various great public bodies, and from many schools; the students of St. Augustine's College, boys of the King's School and Clergy Orphan School, and not these only but also