AT Lambeth, in the guard-room still so-called, now dining-room, where the portraits of the Archbishops hang, immediately opposite the door by which you enter, and close to a window, so that the yellow London light falls on it, hangs a portrait that instantly attracts the attention. True, it is a masterpiece of Vandyck's; but it is not the painting that surprises, though it is to its utter life-likeness that the surprise is due. Again and again I have heard people ask, "And who is that very extraordinary-looking person?" and, on being told who it is, say in a tone of incredulous bewilderment, "That Laud!"

The fact is that the name of Laud, to those to whom it conveys any ideas at all, stands for one of two things: either he is a type of all that is sacerdotal and objectionable in the Church of England, the most mischievous prelate that has ever borne supreme rule there; he is the bigot, the

SURPRISING CHARACTERISTICS.

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ecclesiastic, par excellence,-the eternal instance of what is called the "clerical" mind-using the word in the sense of narrow, sectarian, credulous, and unsympathetic. And these are astonished, for he wears the face of a kindly cheery man. Or else he is the "martyred Laud," the saviour of the Church in her Catholic aspect, the restorer of the shrine, the true son of Aaron, robed as God Himself appoints. And the face bears witness to none of these things; if faces betray character this man had little of the saint about him.

Of all the thirty-four portraits of ecclesiastics who there appear, this one is the most enigmatic. It represents a man in a square cap, worn very far back on the head so as to show a great height of forehead. The face is plump and short, with but few lines in it, of a fine fresh colour. He was then some sixty-seven years of age, and he looks but forty. The little moustache and imperial worn by the clergy of that date give a curiously secular finish to what is already a secular face. But the most marked features are the small, delicately pencilled eyebrows, drawn very high up by the wrinkling of the brows, giving a look of half-cynical surprise, a mute protest, to the face. Downdropped brows, like a penthouse over receding eyes, give either a pensive or a gloomy secretive look of this there is

absolutely no trace in Laud's face. The whole expression would be called sunny, if it were not for that half-pathetic, half-humorous raising of the brow. They seem to say, "I have told you; I have warned you. I have laid down before you the paths you ought to walk in, the paths you ought to tread; if you will not be warned you may walk on still in darkness, you may go your own way,I at least have done my part."

It is not trivial to contrast Laud's portrait with that of his master, Charles Stuart himself. The contrast is a painful one. The look of serene prosperity about the prelate loses ground by the side of the gloom and weariness in the face of the king-that look of doom, as it has been called-that has won him, and will win him, so many passionate admirers.

The window by which Laud hangs looks into the front court of the Palace-gravelled now, a grass-grown lawn then. The air is full of the solemn roar of London. To the left is the great gate which the rioters assaulted; to the right, the skeletons of the high garden elms under which he walked with Hales of Eton. Close below the windows of the library, in spite of London fog and sunless air, flourish the broad-fingered, grey-green leaves of the fig-trees, the successors of those that he himself planted, by which he used to pace;

where, he records in his diary, at the first touch of spring, his tortoise, then some sixty years old, that had been given him when at Oxford, used to issue from some secret crack and crawl painfully about. And, curiously enough, when the other day I was turning over some dusty relics-old parchment-deeds, faded stiff church-vestments, seals and crosses, that repose in an oak press in the Muniment-room, there I came upon a tortoise-shell at the back of the shelf, on which was pasted a strip of paper, inscribed in antique brown characters, "The Shell of a Tortoise, which was put into the Garden at Lambeth in the year 1633, where it remained till the year 1753, when it was unfortunately (or mortally) killed by the overflowing of the river." *

Laud was born at Reading, a town he always loved. His memory was long held in honour there. A minute in the Corporation Diary, in 1695, records the decision that a small oak desk should be affixed to the panelling on the left side of the CouncilChamber chimney-piece, and that a copy of the "Troubles and Tryal of William Laud" should be chained to the desk with a chain of brass for ever. The house where he was born has disappeared, but

* Or perhaps, as Ducarel says, "the negligence of the gardener." The slip is nearly illegible.

the fact is commemorated by the nomenclature of the block that has succeeded it-Laud Place.

In Reading he built an almshouse, which still exists, endowing it with lands at Bray. "Done," he writes, with characteristic method, against the project in the little paper of "Things I have projected to do if God bless me in them." There is another curious and characteristic entry about that project, in the Diary: "The way to do the town of Reading good, for their poor; which may be compassed by God's blessing upon me, though my wealth be small. And I hope God will bless me in it, because it was His own motion in me. For this way never came into my thoughts (though I had much beaten about it) till this night, as I was at my prayers. Jan. 1, 1633-4."

He was of the middle class- -a class which the Puritans introduced to importance: they had been overlooked till then. He was the only child of a second marriage. His father was a wellto-do master tailor, employing many work-people, and leaving a good report behind him. "E fæce plebis," said his enemies—“ Raked out of the dunghill." His maternal uncle, Sir Benjamin Webb, had been Lord Mayor of London. There was no trouble in the family from poverty.

This origin must be kept in mind. It is some