Chapter M: Renan's Hibbert Lectures15 (8)

After breaking with England and all things English in wrath and sorrow, nearly thirty-five years ago, after a long life of modest retirement, unmarked by any public honours, at length before he dies Dr. Newman is recognised by Protestant England as one of its greatest men. It watches with interest his journey to Rome, his proceedings at Rome. In a crowd of new Cardinals--men of eminence in their own communion--he is the only one about whom Englishmen know or care anything. His words, when he speaks, pass _verbatim_ along the telegraph wires, like the words of the men who sway the world. We read of the quiet Oxford scholar's arms emblazoned on vestment and furniture as those of a Prince of the Church, and of his motto--_Cor ad cor loquitur_. In that motto is the secret of all that he is to his countrymen. For that skill of which he is such a master, in the use of his and their "sweet mother tongue," is something much more than literary accomplishment and power. It means that he has the key to what is deepest in their nature and most characteristic in them of feeling and conviction--to what is deeper than opinions and theories and party divisions; to what in their most solemn moments they most value and most believe in.

His profound sympathy with the religiousness which still, with all the variations and all the immense shortcomings of English religion, marks England above all cultivated Christian nations, is really the bond between him and his countrymen, who yet for the most part think so differently from him, both about the speculative grounds and many of the practical details of religion. But it was natural for him, on an occasion like this, reviewing the past and connecting it with the present, to dwell on these differences. He repeated once more, and made it the keynote of his address, his old protest against "Liberalism in religion," the "doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but one creed is as good as another." He lamented the decay of the power of authority, the disappearance of religion from the sphere of political influence, from education, from legislation. He deplored the increasing impossibility of getting men to work together on a common religious basis. He pointed out the increasing seriousness and earnestness of the attempts to "supersede, to block out religion," by an imposing and high morality, claiming to dispense with it.

He dwelt on the mischief and dangers; he expressed, as any Christian would, his fearlessness and faith in spite of them; but do we gather, even from such a speaker, and on such an occasion, anything of the remedy? The principle of authority is shaken, he tells us; what can he suggest to restore it? He under-estimates, probably, the part which authority plays, implicitly yet very really, in English popular religion, much more in English Church religion; and authority, even in Rome, is not everything, and does not reach to every subject. But authority in our days can be nothing without real confidence in it; and where confidence in authority has been lost, it is idle to attempt to restore it by telling men that authority is a good and necessary thing. It must be won back, not simply claimed. It must be regained, when forfeited, by the means by which it was originally gained. And the strange phenomenon was obviously present to his clear and candid mind, though he treated it as one which is disappearing, and must at length pass away, that precisely here in England, where the only religious authority he recognises has been thrown off, the hold of religion on public interest is most effective and most obstinately tenacious.

What is the history of this? What is the explanation of it? Why is it that where "authority," as he understands it, has been longest paramount and undisputed, the public place and public force of religion have most disappeared; and that a "dozen men taken at random in the streets" of London find it easier, with all their various sects, to work together on a religious basis than a dozen men taken at random from the streets of Catholic Paris or Rome? Indeed, the public feeling towards himself, expressed in so many ways in the last few weeks, might suggest a question not undeserving of his thoughts. The mass of Englishmen are notoriously anti-Popish and anti-Roman. Their antipathies on this subject are profound, and not always reasonable. They certainly do not here halt between two opinions, or think that one creed is as good as another. What is it which has made so many of them, still retaining all their intense dislike to the system which Cardinal Newman has accepted, yet welcome so heartily his honours in it, notwithstanding that he has passed from England to Rome, and that he owes so much of what he is to England? Is it that they think it does not matter what a man believes, and whether a man turns Papist? Or is it not that, in spite of all that would repel and estrange, in spite of the oppositions of argument and the inconsistencies of speculation, they can afford to recognise in him, as in a high example, what they most sincerely believe in and most deeply prize, and can pay him the tribute of their gratitude and honour, even when unconvinced by his controversial reasonings, and unsatisfied by the theories which he has proposed to explain the perplexing and refractory anomalies of Church history? Is it not that with history, inexorable and unalterable behind them, condemning and justifying, supporting and warning all sides in turn, thoughtful men feel how much easier it is to point out and deplore our disasters than to see a way now to set them right? Is it not also that there are in the Christian Church bonds of affinity, subtler, more real and more prevailing than even the fatal legacies of the great schisms? Is it not that the sympathies which unite the author of the _Parochial Sermons_ and the interpreter of St. Athanasius with the disciples of Andrewes, and Ken, and Bull, of Butler and Wilson, are as strong and natural as the barriers which outwardly keep them asunder are to human eyes hopelessly insurmountable?

XXX

CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE[34]

[34]
_Guardian_, 13th August 1890.

The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things, by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant, though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed, and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen as--not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he was most jealous, but--sympathetic in all that was of interest to England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English Church.

Is not the ultimate key to Newman's history his keen and profound sense of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast, the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular. He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world, and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could. The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate, liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions, and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor, open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable, but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was _that_ which filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr. Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.

Form after form was tried by him, the Christianity of Evangelicalism, the Christianity of Whately, the Christianity of Hawkins, the Christianity of Keble and Pusey; it was all very well, but it was not the Christianity of the New Testament and of the first ages. He wrote the _Church of the Fathers_ to show they were not merely evidences of religion, but really living men; that they could and did live as they taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman Church had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength through the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was full, and which are characteristic of it--devotion and self-sacrifice. The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a "pardon" were much more like the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee--like them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition--than anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the Salvation Army were one of its instruments. And the spirit which governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters of the poor and of hospitals. Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance. He recoiled from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his eye was without them. He turned to where, in spite of every other disadvantage, he thought he found them. In S. Filippo Neri he could find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation. He could find no S. Filippo--so modern and yet so Scriptural--when he sought at home.

His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed with the greatness of the Church of Rome. But in his early days it was the greatness of Anti-Christ. Then came the change, and his sense of greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration. It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of the New Testament and of the first ages as the English. He recognised it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact, incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman explanations of the fact. But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another. And it was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him from the associations and the affections of half a lifetime.

The final break with the English Church was with much heat and bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant the language used on each side. The English Church had received too much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him, and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party, whose secession might have caused fatal damage. And he, too, knew too much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.

But as time went over him in his new position two things made themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life, lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by men--men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters--who had, like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and political life, however different in outward look from those of the Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order, which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an "Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the _Dream of Gerontius_, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life--[Greek: kai phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]--dwelt on so fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The force with which these two things made themselves felt as age came on--the disappointments attending his service to the Church, and the grandeur of the physical and social order of the world and its Divine sanction in spite of all that is evil and all that is so shortlived in it--produced a softening in his ways of thought and speech. Never for a moment did his loyalty and obedience to his Church, even when most tried, waver and falter. The thing is inconceivable to any one who ever knew him, and the mere suggestion would be enough to make him blaze forth in all his old fierceness and power. But perfectly satisfied of his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies, his chief interests were for things English--English literature, English social life, English politics, English religion. He liked to identify himself, as far as it was possible, with things English, even with things that belonged to his own first days. He republished his Oxford sermons and treatises. He prized his honorary fellowship at Trinity; he enjoyed his visit to Oxford, and the welcome which he met there. He discerned how much the English Church counted for in the fight going on in England for the faith in Christ. There was in all that he said and did a gentleness, a forbearance, a kindly friendliness, a warm recognition of the honour paid him by his countrymen, ever since the _Apologia_ had broken down the prejudices which had prevented Englishmen from doing him justice. As with his chief antagonist at Oxford, Dr. Hawkins, advancing years brought with them increasing gentleness, and generosity, and courtesy. But through all this there was perceptible to those who watched a pathetic yearning for something which was not to be had: a sense, resigned--for so it was ordered--but deep and piercing, how far, not some of us, but all of us, are from the life of the New Testament: how much there is for religion to do, and how little there seems to be to do it.

XXXI

CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS[35]

[35]
_Guardian_, 20th August 1890.

Every one feels what is meant when we speak of a person's ways being "natural," in contrast to being artificial, or overstrained, or studied, or affected. But it is easier to feel what is meant than to explain and define it. We sometimes speak as if it were a mere quality of manner; as if it belonged to the outside show of things, and denoted the atmosphere, clear and transparent, through which they are viewed. It corresponds to what is lucid in talk and style, and what ethically is straightforward and unpretentious. But it is something much more than a mere surface quality. When it is real and part of the whole character, and not put on from time to time for effect, it reaches a long way down to what is deepest and most significant in a man's moral nature. It is connected with the sense of truth, with honest self-judgment, with habits of self-discipline, with the repression of vanity, pride, egotism. It has no doubt to do with good taste and good manners, but it has as much to do with good morals--with the resolute habit of veracity with oneself--with the obstinate preference for reality over show, however tempting--with the wholesome power of being able to think little about oneself.

It is common to speak of the naturalness and ease of Cardinal Newman's style in writing. It is, of course, the first thing that attracts notice when we open one of his books; and there are people who think it bald and thin and dry. They look out for longer words, and grander phrases, and more involved constructions, and neater epigrams. They expect a great theme to be treated with more pomp and majesty, and they are disappointed. But the majority of English readers seem to be agreed in recognising the beauty and transparent flow of his language, which matches the best French writing in rendering with sureness and without effort the thought of the writer. But what is more interesting than even the formation of such a style--a work, we may be sure, not accomplished without much labour--is the man behind the style. For the man and the style are one in this perfect naturalness and ease. Any one who has watched at all carefully the Cardinal's career, whether in old days or later, must have been struck with this feature of his character, his naturalness, the freshness and freedom with which he addressed a friend or expressed an opinion, the absence of all mannerism and formality; and, where he had to keep his dignity, both his loyal obedience to the authority which enjoined it and the half-amused, half-bored impatience that he should be the person round whom all these grand doings centred. It made the greatest difference in his friendships whether his friends met him on equal terms, or whether they brought with them too great conventional deference or solemnity of manner. "So and so is a very good fellow, but he is not a man to talk to in your shirt sleeves," was his phrase about an over-logical and over-literal friend. Quite aware of what he was to his friends and to the things with which he was connected, and ready with a certain quickness of temper which marked him in old days to resent anything unbecoming done to his cause or those connected with it, he would not allow any homage to be paid to himself. He was by no means disposed to allow liberties to be taken or to put up with impertinence; for all that bordered on the unreal, for all that was pompous, conceited, affected, he had little patience; but almost beyond all these was his disgust at being made the object of foolish admiration. He protested with whimsical fierceness against being made a hero or a sage; he was what he was, he said, and nothing more; and he was inclined to be rude when people tried to force him into an eminence which he refused. With his profound sense of the incomplete and the ridiculous in this world, and with a humour in which the grotesque and the pathetic sides of life were together recognised at every moment, he never hesitated to admit his own mistakes--his "floors" as he called them. All this ease and frankness with those whom he trusted, which was one of the lessons which he learnt from Hurrell Froude, an intercourse which implied a good deal of give and take--all this satisfied his love of freedom, his sense of the real. It was his delight to give himself free play with those whom he could trust; to feel that he could talk with "open heart," understood without explaining, appealing for a response which would not fail, though it was not heard. He could be stiff enough with those who he thought were acting a part, or pretending to more than they could perform. But he believed--what was not very easy to believe beforehand--that he could win the sympathy of his countrymen, though not their agreement with him; and so, with characteristic naturalness and freshness, he wrote the _Apologia_.

XXXII

LORD BLACHFORD[36]

[36]
_Guardian_, 27th Nov. 1889.

Lord Blachford, whose death was announced last week, belonged to a generation of Oxford men of whom few now survive, and who, of very different characters and with very different careers and histories, had more in common than any set of contemporaries at Oxford since their time. Speaking roughly, they were almost the last product of the old training at public school and at college, before the new reforms set in; of a training confessedly imperfect and in some ways deplorably defective, but with considerable elements in it of strength and manliness, with keen instincts of contempt for all that savoured of affectation and hollowness, and with a sort of largeness and freedom about it, both in its outlook and its discipline, which suited vigorous and self-reliant natures in an exciting time, when debate ran high and the gravest issues seemed to be presenting themselves to English society. The reformed system which has taken its place at Oxford criticises, not without some justice, the limitations of the older one; the narrow range of its interests, the few books which men read, and the minuteness with which they were "got up." But if these men did not learn all that a University ought to teach its students, they at least learned two things. They learned to work hard, and they learned to make full use of what they knew. They framed an ideal of practical life, which was very variously acted upon, but which at any rate aimed at breadth of grasp and generosity of purpose, and at being thorough. This knot of men, who lived a good deal together, were recognised at the time as young men of much promise, and they looked forward to life with eagerness and high aspiration. They have fulfilled their promise; their names are mixed up with all the recent history of England; they have filled its great places and governed its policy during a large part of the Queen's long reign. Their names are now for the most part things of the past--Sidney Herbert, Lord Canning, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Elgin, Lord Cardwell, the Wilberforces, Mr. Hope Scott, Archbishop Tait. But they still have their representatives among us--Mr. Gladstone, Lord Selborne, Lord Sherbrooke, Sir Thomas Acland, Cardinal Manning. It is not often that a University generation or two can produce such a list of names of statesmen and rulers; and the list might easily be enlarged.

To this generation Frederic Rogers belonged, not the least distinguished among his contemporaries; and he was early brought under an influence likely to stimulate in a high degree whatever powers a man possessed, and to impress a strong character with elevated and enduring ideas of life and duty. Mr. Newman, with Mr. Hurrell Froude and Mr. Robert Wilberforce, had recently been appointed tutors of their college by Dr. Copleston. They were in the first eagerness of their enthusiasm to do great things with the college, and the story goes that Mr. Newman, on the look-out for promising pupils, wrote to an Eton friend, asking him to recommend some good Eton men for admission at Oriel. Frederic Rogers, so the story goes, was one of those mentioned; at any rate, he entered at Oriel, and became acquainted with Mr. Newman as a tutor, and the admiration and attachment of the undergraduate ripened into the most unreserved and affectionate friendship of the grown man--a friendship which has lasted through all storms and difficulties, and through strong differences of opinion, till death only has ended it. From Mr. Newman his pupil caught that earnest devotion to the cause of the Church which was supreme with him through life. He entered heartily into Mr. Newman's purpose to lift the level of the English Church and its clergy. While Mr. Newman at Oxford was fighting the battle of the English Church, there was no one who was a closer friend than Rogers, no one in whom Mr. Newman had such trust, none whose judgment he so valued, no one in whose companionship he so delighted; and the master's friendship was returned by the disciple with a noble and tender, and yet manly honesty. There came, as we know, times which strained even that friendship; when the disciple, just at the moment when the master most needed and longed for sympathy and counsel, had to choose between his duty to his Church and the claims and ties of friendship. He could not follow in the course which his master and friend had found inevitable; and that deepest and most delightful friendship had to be given up. But it was given up, not indeed without great suffering on both sides, but without bitterness or unworthy thoughts. The friend had seen too closely the greatness and purity of his master's character to fail in tenderness and loyalty, even when he thought his master going most wrong. He recognised that the error, deplorable as he thought it, was the mistake of a lofty and unselfish soul; and in the height of the popular outcry against him he came forward, with a distant and touching reverence, to take his old friend's part and rebuke the clamour. And at length the time came when disagreements were left long behind and each person had finally taken his recognised place; and then the old ties were knit up again. It could not be the former friendship of every day and of absolute and unreserved confidence. But it was the old friendship of affection and respect renewed, and pleasure in the interchange of thoughts. It was a friendship of the antique type, more common, perhaps, even in the last century than with us, but enriched with Christian hopes and Christian convictions.

Lord Blachford, in spite of his brilliant Oxford reputation, and though he was a singularly vigorous writer, with wide interests and very independent thought, has left nothing behind him in the way of literature. This was partly because he very early became a man of affairs; partly that his health interfered with habits of study. It used to be told at Oxford that when he was working for his Double First he could scarcely use his eyes, and had to learn much of his work by being read to. The result was that he was not a great reader; and a man ought to be a reader who is to be a writer. But, besides this, there was a strongly marked feature in his character which told in the same direction. There was a curious modesty about him which formed a contrast with other points; with a readiness and even eagerness to put forth and develop his thoughts on matters that interested him, with a perfect consciousness of his remarkable powers of statement and argument, with a constitutional impetuosity blended with caution which showed itself when anything appealed to his deeper feelings or called for his help; yet with all these impelling elements, his instinct was always to shrink from putting himself forward, except when it was a matter of duty. He accepted recognition when it came, but he never claimed it. And this reserve, which marked his social life, kept him back from saying in a permanent form much that he had to say, and that was really worth saying. Like many of the distinguished men of his day, he was occasionally a journalist. We have been reminded by the _Times_ that he at one time wrote for that paper. And he was one of the men to whose confidence and hope in the English Church the _Guardian_ owes its existence.

His life was the uneventful one of a diligent and laborious public servant, and then of a landlord keenly alive to the responsibilities of his position. He passed through various subordinate public employments, and finally succeeded Mr. Herman Merivale as permanent Under-Secretary for the Colonies. It is a great post, but one of which the work is done for the most part out of sight. Colonial Secretaries in Parliament come and go, and have the credit, often quite justly, of this or that policy. But the public know little of the permanent official who keeps the traditions and experience of the department, whose judgment is always an element, often a preponderating element, in eventful decisions, and whose pen drafts the despatches which go forth in the name of the Government. Sir Frederic Rogers, as he became in time, had to deal with some of the most serious colonial questions which arose and were settled while he was at the Colonial Office. He took great pains, among other things, to remove, or at least diminish, the difficulties which beset the _status_ of the Colonial Church and clergy, and to put its relations to the Church at home on a just and reasonable footing. There is a general agreement as to the industry and conspicuous ability with which his part of the work was done. Mr. Gladstone set an admirable example in recognising in an unexpected way faithful but unnoticed services, and at the same time paid a merited honour to the permanent staff of the public offices, when he named Sir Frederic Rogers for a peerage.

Lord Blachford, for so he became on his retirement from the Colonial Office, cannot be said to have quitted entirely public life, as he always, while his strength lasted, acknowledged public claims on his time and industry. He took his part in two or three laborious Commissions, doing the same kind of valuable yet unseen work which he had done in office, guarding against blunders, or retrieving them, giving direction and purpose to inquiries, suggesting expedients. But his main employment was now at his own home. He came late in life to the position of a landed proprietor, and he at once set before himself as his object the endeavour to make his estate as perfect as it could be made--perfect in the way in which a naturally beautiful country and his own good taste invited him to make it, but beyond all, as perfect as might be, viewed as the dwelling-place of his tenants and the labouring poor. A keen and admiring student of political economy, his sympathies were always with the poor. He was always ready to challenge assumptions, such as are often loosely made for the convenience of the well-to-do. The solicitude which always pursued him was the thought of his cottages, and it was not satisfied till the last had been put in good order. The same spirit prompted him to allow labourers who could manage the undertaking to rent pasture for a few cows; and the experiment, he thought, had succeeded. The idea of justice and the general welfare had too strong a hold on his mind to allow him to be sentimental in dealing with the difficult questions connected with land. But if his labourers found him thoughtful of their comfort his farmers found him a good landlord--strict where he met with dishonesty and carelessness, but open-minded and reasonable in understanding their points of view, and frank, equitable, and liberal in meeting their wishes. Disclaiming all experience of country matters, and not minding if he fell into some mistakes, he made his care of his estate a model of the way in which a good man should discharge his duties to the land.

His was one of those natures which have the gift of inspiring confidence in all who come near him; all who had to do with him felt that they could absolutely trust him. The quality which was at the bottom of his character as a man was his unswerving truthfulness; but upon this was built up a singularly varied combination of elements not often brought together, and seldom in such vigour and activity. Keen, rapid, penetrating, he was quick in detecting anything that rung hollow in language or feeling; and he did not care to conceal his dislike and contempt. But no one threw himself with more genuine sympathy into the real interests of other people. No matter what it was, ethical or political theory, the course of a controversy, the arrangement of a trust-deed, the oddities of a character, the marvels of natural science, he was always ready to go with his companion as far as he chose to go, and to take as much trouble as if the question started had been his own. Where his sense of truth was not wounded he was most considerate and indulgent; he seemed to keep through life his schoolboy's amused tolerance for mischief that was not vicious. No one entered more heartily into the absurdities of a grotesque situation; of no one could his friends be so sure that he would miss no point of a good story; and no one took in at once more completely or with deeper feeling the full significance of some dangerous incident in public affairs, or discerned more clearly the real drift of confused and ambiguous tendencies. He was conscious of the power of his intellect, and he liked to bring it to bear on what was before him; he liked to probe things to the bottom, and see how far his companion in conversation was able to go; but ready as he was with either argument or banter he never, unless provoked, forced the proof of his power on others. For others, indeed, of all classes and characters, so that they were true, he had nothing but kindness, geniality, forbearance, the ready willingness to meet them on equal terms. Those who had the privilege of his friendship remember how they were kept up in their standard and measure of duty by the consciousness of his opinion, his judgment, his eagerness to feel with them, his fearless, though it might be reluctant, expression of disagreement It was, indeed, that very marked yet most harmonious combination of severity and tenderness which gave such interest to his character. A strong love of justice, a deep and unselfish and affectionate gentleness and patience, are happily qualities not too rare. But to have known one at once so severely just and so indulgently tender and affectionate makes a mark in a man's life which he forgets at his peril.

THE END

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