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split, was a performance which Churchmen could adequately appreciate, but one in which non-Churchmen felt not a particle of interest.. As a national Archbishop or leader of the people, Dr. Benson was a conspicuous failure, if it is fair to use the word "fail" about a man who never made an attempt to succeed. As a leader and exponent of the conscience of the nation in relation to social and political reform, he was nowhere beside Cardinal Manning, who was Archbishop of all England in a sense that no Archbishop of Canterbury has even aspired to be, since the Reformation. But, notwithstanding that, Archbishop Benson, by his negative virtues, by the quiet, unostentatious manner in which he performed his duties, and perhaps, more than all, by the manner in which he passed away, has succeeded in enabling English people to realise, as they never did before, how strong a hold our national Church has on the national sentiment, and how much more closely we have attained to the Broad Church ideal of a national Church than most people twenty years ago would have believed to be possible.

This popular interest has shown itself in a multitude of curious ways, and no topic of discussion has been more general at dinner tables and in railway carriages, wherever people meet together, than the discussion pro and con as to the chances of various candidates who were supposed to be in the running. It sounds an awful thing to say, but it would want a very little stimulus for us to see the odds about the various candidates quoted regularly beside Tattersall's latest betting in all the morning and afternoon papers. From that development, however, it is to be hoped that we have been saved, if only by the prompt nomination of Archbishop Benson's successor.

The Life of Archbishop Magee appeared very opportunely just as the life of Archbishop Benson came to a close. In this book we are allowed to see something of the inside track of the making of bishops and archbishops.

Dr. Magce was a great wit and a great orator, although he may not have been a great statesman. He represents a type almost exactly the antithesis of that of Dr. Benson. Archbishop Benson was a meek man, full of unction and kindly piety, and of a disinclination to assert himself that led his many impatient critics to declare that he was no better than an old woman. Archbishop Magee was exactly the contrary in all these respects. He was a man of strong opinions, which he expressed with a keenness that sometimes cut like a knife. He lives in popular memory as the bishop who declared, if the choice lay between England sober and enslaved, or England drunk and free, he would give his Voice unhesitatingly for England drunk and free. might have been thought it was somewhat difficult for a bishop to break this record; but Archbishop Magee achieved this task by his formal and explicit declaration against regarding the Sermon on the Mount as of any practical use for the guidance and governance of statesmen.

It

I. MAGEE AS FALSE PROPHET. His biographer, Canon MacDonnell, claims that Archbishop Magee was to his Church like the prophets of old were to Israel. This is high praise, which will not be endorsed by those who read the very entertaining collection of letters which Canon MacDonnell has published as the Life of Archbishop Mage; at least, not if the prophet is supposed to have been anything of a predictor or seer. Nothing is more remarkable in these two volumes than the astounding inability of the Archbishop to read the signs of the times. A worse

prophet it would be difficult to find, even among the battalion of tipsters who serve as prophets to the racing community. The most extraordinary thing is that the Archbishop blundered most badly about the very matters on which he might have been expected to be more than ordinarily well informed. Dr. Magee as a bishop and an archbishop lived in the very heart and centre of English elericalism. He was devoted to his Church, and a firm believer in her divine mission. He might have been supposed, therefore, to have had natural bias in favour of believing she would be able to triumph over her enemies and fulfil her great ideal.

As the introductory remarks of this article suffice to show, the fact as to the drift of events is so plain that no one, even if prejudiced against the Church, can avoid recognising how enormously the Church has increased her hold upon the nation. But when we turn to Archbishop's Magee's letters, we find that he is not merely lugubrious, but absolutely quite certain that the Church, especially the Church as an Establishment, is on its last legs. Whether it was from dissensions within or from Radical attacks without, he was confident that the game was up. For instance, in a letter written just before his elevation to the Archbishopric, he refused to bestir himself in order to secure any improvement in such matters of importance as the granting of marriage licences for divorced persons. He wrote:

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Rule of all kinds in our Church seems out of date, and the catastrophe which will substitute the will of the laity for the will of the bishops is so near at hand, that a little more or a little less of anarchy meanwhile is not of much consequence. We are now well over the edge of the Niagara, and I do not greatly care to strain my muscles in bailing or trimming the boat on its way down.

Over and over again we find the same despairing diagnosis on the condition of the body to which he belonged. On January 27th, 1887, he sent to his friend Canon MacDonnell the following forecast:

I fear that anarchy and faction will triumph ere long. There is not patience enough in a Democracy to hold out and play the waiting game. They will have everything settled out of hand, and, consequently, they will speedily settle their own hash, and stew in it afterwards-Irish Home Rule, purchased by Welsh and Scotch Radical and Nonconformist votes, and sold to Gladstone for Disestablishment and Revolution hereafter.

But the most astonishingly bad forecast that a man ever made is surely the following, which he wrote on December 1st, 1885, in the middle of the first General Election after Household Suffrage was extended to the counties. Dr. Magee wrote carefully, for he specially asks his correspondent to put the letter by in order that it may be read ten years later

in the retreat wherever we shall have gone to spend our few remaining disestablishment years.

After pointing out, what was obvious enough to every one, that the election must result in making Parnell master of the situation, the Bishop wrote as follows:

This means Irish revolution first, and then an embittered struggle between the revolutionary and Conservative forees in England and Scotland, the revolution winning and being merciless after the bitterness of the fight.

I give the Church of England two Parliaments to live through.

This one now coming, in which she will be merely worried and humiliated.

The next, in which she will be assailed and disestablished in the Commons.

The third, in which the Peers will give way, and the thing

is done.

The Parliaments, too, will be short-lived and stormy. Gladstone's retirement will bring this one to a close.

The second will dissolve on the Church question early.
The third will settle it; say, ten years for all this.

The ten years have passed and gone, and, the Liberation Society itself being judge, the Church of England is much stronger to-day than it was then, and the prospect of disestablishment and disendowment has been indefinitely postponed. But Dr. Magee could see nothing to reassure him in the tendency of the times. The General Election of 1880 seems to have knocked the bottom out of all his faith in England. Beaconsfield had made him Bishop of Peterborough, and after the election was over, and Lord Beaconsfield defeated, he seemed to lose all faith in any possible redemption for England in the future.

When the Liberal Party became Radical, pure and simple, he declared it was inevitable they would win and should be headed by Gladstone. Then would come the last struggle between the Church and Democracy, and there is no doubt which would win --namely, Democracy. For, so far from thinking his Church was founded upon a rock and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it, the great prelate was quite certain it was founded upon sand, and it would inevitably be submerged by the waves of the rising Democratic tide. Whether he sat in Parliament or in Convocation, he was haunted by a dreadful foreboding of judgment to come. Writing, for instance, on April 15th, 1880, he

says:

Truly the clergy, and Bishops too, of our Church ever since I have known them have made a wonderful pother and clatter about shutting the stable-door of the Establishment just after cach steed has been stolen or driven out of his stall.

The coming events are getting now nearly as clear as Mene and Tekel were once upon a time.

For myself, I have quietly said good-bye to Parliament and Convocation, where I only succeed in wasting three things, none of which I have too much of-viz, time, money, and temper. Convocation is too utterly ridiculous a farce for me to play in it any longer. For the last seven years we Bishops have been sitting in the back attic of the Church grandly discussing the papering of it, with the house on fire in the kitchen, and burglars breaking in at the parlour windows. And for this and other matters verily we shall have our reward, and that speedily, unless there be no such thing as a Nemesis for timidity. There, now that is off my mind, and I feel rather better.

It is impossible not to feel a certain measure of compassionate sympathy for a man so vigorous, so energetic, so keen, and so full of life, who, nevertheless, seems to have spent his days under the overshadowing gloom of an imaginary catastrophe. Of course, it is quite possible that Disestablishment may come, and that the Church may be the better for Disestablishment, but that was not his opinion. Six years before he was quite as certain that everything was going to the bad.

In 1874, when the Public Worship Regulation Bill was before Parliament, he summed up the situation as follows:

"This P. W. Bill will try all our wisdom and courage in its working. I fear the result will be episcopal dissidence and practical indiscretions, or accusations of it, here and there, until at last the Puritanism and Erastianism of the House of Commons grows impatient, takes the reins in its own hands, and upsets the coach! The determined Erastianism of the Archbishop, the exasperation of the High Church clergy, the dishonesty of the Ritualists, the fanatical bitterness of the Evangelicals, and the sublime unprinciple of Dizzy, all point this way; the Bishops, too, are sore at the way the Archbishop has overridden them in the conduct of the Bill, and

sore at the false accusations of the clergy, and will form a very rebellious team for his Grace to drive in January

next."

It is evident that he had arrived at a deliberate conclusion that nothing could save the National Church :-The history of National Churches seems to me to divide itself into three phases.

1st. That of conversion of the State by the Church. 2nd. That of adoption of the Church by the State. 3rd. That of contest between Church and State for supremacy, in which the Church in the end is always worsted, and must separate to save her life, generally with the loss of her goods.

(1) Courtship; (2) marriage; and (3) divorce without alimony, sum up all Church and State relations.

In the first stage the State is heathen and hostile. In the second, Christian and friendly, often subservient and lavish, like an uxorious bridegroom.

In the third stage the State is non-Christian, latitudinarian, stingy, and tyrannical; like the same bridegroom grown old and hard, cutting down the pin money, quibbling about the settlements, and impatient for a release; unfaithful, too, now and then, and generally disposed to set up a harem of all sorts.

Now I believe we have come to this third stage in our history; and our wisdom will be to look out for an amicable separation, and try to secure as much of the dowry as possible. Any clerical share in the representation of the nation, if it ever comes, should come after and not before such separation. Now, it would weaken our position, as we should seem through. our representatives to have been parties to measures we could not prevent, to say nothing of the ill-effects on the clerical spiritual mind of electioneering and all its belongings.

He even imagined he could foresee the exact point at which the yoke of the State would become intolerable to the Church. Speaking of Mr. Voysey's proposal to reform the Church, so as to readmit him, and the like of him, as a desirable alternative to Disestablishment, Dr. Magee wrote:

Truly it may come to that yet, but not just at present. But mark my words: reform of that kind, and not Disestablishment, will be the game of the Church's enemies in Parliament. They will strive to fix on us such an Egyptian bondage of Erastianism and Latitudinarianism as shall force us to cry out for separation, and then, as in like cases matrimonial, the husband will keep the dowry. See if what I am saying will not come true, and see too if the really dangerous symptom of its coming true be not relaxation of the marriage laws. This is the point on which Church and State can be most rapidly brought into serious collision. Whenever the State treats, and requires the Church to treat, as married, those whom the Church declares to be not married or marriageable, then will come a strain that will snap, or go near snapping, the links that bind Church and State.

If a man who is in the central swim of things in the Church should blunder so utterly about matters with which he is familiar, what possible respect can be paid to his judgment on those secular politics about which he is much less competent to speak? Here, for instance, is another of his forecasts:

Surely of all governments that by hysterics is the worst, and England is being more and more governed by the hysteria of half-educated men and women. The aristocratic oligarchy of the last century was selfish and short-sighted as regards domestic policy; but it was cool, far-seeing, and prompt as regards foreign policy. 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, newspaper-reading, 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. Well, you and I are in our fifty-seventh years. Let our children look to it. But the England of thirty years hence, if Dr. Cummings will let the world last so long, will surely be the nastiest residence conceivable for any one, save infidel prigs and unsexed women.

And then again in the same strain we read:

Politics in England mean, more and more, liberty and intimidation. Bribery of whole classes instead of, as of old, individual voters, and intimidation of classes likewise by larger classes, and both of these in the interest of ambitious and unprincipled demagogues. For this reason I dread and detest this idea of handing over social power, i.e., power over the liberties and happiness of individuals, to boards of every sort, from parish vestries up to-or down to-that most blatant and factious of all vestries, the House of Commons.

He speaks on another occasion savagely about the blatant and mischievous nonsense that our platform spouters are uttering upon a question on which they know absolutely nothing but this supplies these spouters with an opportunity for a very crushing rejoinder. The subject upon which he spoke so bitterly, namely, the attack on the policy of Lord Beaconsfield in 1876, supplies the most brilliant vindication of the wisdom of the political spouter at the expense of the Bishop himself, for if ever there was a policy which has been weighed in the balance and found wanting, it was the policy to attack which in the Bishop's eyes was the very acme of passionate injustice and ignorant presumption.

Truce, however, to the evidence which these volumes afford of what the American newspapers would call the monumental ignorance of one of the cleverest Bishops that ever wore lawn.

II. ON THE MAKING OF AN ARCHBISHOP. Let us turn then to the account which he gives of the making of an Archbishop. First of all, he must be made a Bishop; for, although Mr. Gladstone wished to make Dean Church Primate, the rule is almost invariable that the Archbishop must be chosen from the ranks of the Bishops. Dr. Magee was made Bishop by Disraeli at the time when Dean Church was promoted to the Deanery of St. Paul's. Mr. MacDonnell tells us that Dr. Magee, being then Dean of Cork in the not yet disestablished Church of Ireland, wrote to Disraeli that he might do worse than remember Dr. Magee in any distribution of ecclesiastical patronage that might fall to his share in consequence of the changes made by the promotion of Dean Church. At that time the Government was sadly in need of reinforcing its debaters in the House of Lords, in view of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Church resolutions. Therefore, Disraeli decided to give him the Bishopric, and communicated the fact to the applicant at Cork in a letter which was written with a pleasant spice of a joke, for it began, as if the request was refused, with the following lines:

Very Reverend Sir,-I regret that I cannot comply with your request

Then turning over the leaf, the disappointed Doctor read :

-for I felt it my duty to recommend Her Majesty to nominate you, if agreeable to yourself, to the vacant See of Peterborough.

Dr. Magee being thus duly installed as a Bishop, he continued to exercise episcopal functions for the next twenty-four years in the diocese of Peterborough. He was rather painfully conscious of the fact that, despite his pre-eminent abilities, he was, to use his own phrase,

given a back seat by his episcopal brethren. The following passage expresses his thought on this subject:

I am only a poor wild Irishman, and they learned and wise and thoughtful Englishmen, who look down with all the fine contempt of an English university man upon the man whose degree is not of Oxford or Cambridge. Truly, your true Oxford or Cambridge Don seems to regard his university even as a heavenly city of the Revelations. "Without are dogs!" I might have had some influence if I had only been an English university man, with a stutter! I have all through my episcopate felt this keenly, perhaps too keenly. But the thing reached its height at the Lambeth Conference when, out of all the English diocesan bishops, I was almost the only one to whom was given no part in the opening discussion of their fifteen subjects, and when I had to fight for five minutes', time in which to speak on one of them.

But that was in 1890. Twelve months had not passed. before on the morning of January 6th, 1891:

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I received this morning a letter from Salisbury's secretary, Schomberg McDonnell, telling me that Lord Salisbury had submitted my name to the Queen, "who received it very graciously," but adding that there was some doubt as to whether I would accept, and that, as it was "very undesirable" that there should be a refusal, Lord S. wished to be assured on this point before making the offer. He also wished for the "earliest possible" answer, and McDonnell begged for a telegraphic "Yes" or "No" addressed to Hatfield, where he went last night.

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You may imagine how dazed I felt by such an offer, accompanied by a request for a Yes" or No" by telegram. I quite understood Lord S.'s desire to be freed from importunities by my answer, but it was a tremendous decision to make at a few hours' notice. I could not consult you or any one save my wife, in whose judgment, you know, I justly repose the greatest confidence. After such thought and prayer and consultations as I could give, I telegraphed “Yes.”

Four days later Lord Salisbury's letter offering the Bishop an Archbishopric, with the Queen's permission, arrived at the Palace. His reasons for accepting are duly set forth under seven heads, the fourth of which is thus stated: "I was judged the fittest man. I had no right to decline the office which, by God's help and grace, I might be able to discharge for the good of the Church." The offer came to him, he writes, with an almost sudden surprise. He had not even once thought of the possibility of its being made to him, but when he decided, he had no doubt as to the rightness of his decision. "If a clear conscience, a great sense of relief, and a fresh spring of energy and hopeful purpose are signs of a right decision, I have them all. I feel a strangely new man for my new place."

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It was on January 11th he received the offer of the Archbishopric. It was not until February 20th that he was divested of Peterborough and invested of York. He describes in his letters to his correspondents the various stages of the making of an Archbishop. The investiture was a quaint and interesting ceremony, lasting nearly an hour and a half, including Evensong, of which it made part. Four Bishops besides Canterbury were required to make him into an Archbishop. On Monday he went to Windsor to do homage and be sworn into the Privy Council. On March 5th, a further step was taken in what he called the making of an Archbishop by instalments, for he became the Archbishop of York in the House of Lords. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London introduced him to the Lord Chancellor, to whom kneeling he tendered his writ of summons. Then he returned to the table, took the oath of allegiance, signed the Peers roll, was marched by Canterbury all round the House to the front

Bishops' bench, where he put on his cap, and bowed three times, raising it each time to the Chancellor, who, not to be outdone in politeness, raised his three-cornered hat three times, and then the thing was done. There still remained the Enthronement, which took place in York Minster on March 17th.

As the Archbishop died in the following May, very little is said of his brief archiepiscopal reign. After a month of it he wrote:-

On the whole, so far, I really think I am making way, and have as yet made no mistakes. But it is very slippery walking on the steep housetop of the Church, and I must hold on very cautiously, and not lose my head. Alas! I must be always grave and dignified. Truly dignity and dulness goes together, Samivel: as you gets grander you gets duller.

Apart from his own experiences, it is interesting to read what Dr. Magee wrote concerning the past Archbishops of Canterbury, and their qualifications for this post. In 1876 he wrote of the ecclesiastical

outlook:

The weather just now looks squally for the Church. The Archbishop has cut the ground from under our feet as regards the Burials Bill by his unfortunate and illtimed utterance at Canterbury. He so entirely believes in Parliament and so entirely ignores the clergy, that he is really becoming, with all his noble qualities and great practical sagacity, a great peril to the Church. He regards the clergy as a big Sixth Form, and the outer world as the parents and trustees of the big school, the Church, and acts accordingly. He and our dear brother of Lincoln, with his ultra-clerical sympathies on the other side, have between them pretty nearly carried the Burials Bill.

He wrote in 1883:

I am amused to hear of my being thought of for Canterbury"; about as likely as my being thought of for Grand Mikado of Japan, and really I think I should prefer the latter appointment; I should, at least, know less of its anxieties and dangers beforehand than I do of the other.

When Bishop Tait died, he wrote, "He was a good man, and, in some respects, a great man, and yet just now we need a different stamp of man for our chief. One who will conciliate the clergy as he did the laity, without alienating the latter." The following passage may be read with interest as expressing the mind of a very shrewd observer within the Church as to the qualities most desirable in a new Primate:-

It is, indeed, an anxious time, this, for those who care for Church and State, while we wait to see who is to be given us as our ruler in the Church and our leader and spokesman in our dealings with the State. I think there can be little doubt that our new Primate will be either Winchester, Durham, or Truro. The first would be eminently the fittest, and to the bishops as well as to the clergy the most generally acceptable. His only drawback is his age. The second would command at the moment of his appointment much popular acceptance, which I fear he would in some respects disappoint. The third would, perhaps, all things considered, age especially, prove the best for the Church. He would certainly unite and lead the episcopate better than the second. A fourth-not a bishop-has been named, Dean Church of St. Paul's; in many respects admirable; but to move him over the heads of all the bishops would be a very strong step, though it has been taken before now, ie., Tillotson. For myself, I feel the comfort and pace of mind of a man who looks on a competition in which he can possibly have no share or personal interest whatever. As regards the future, I do not envy the man who will be seated in the chair of Augustine in these times. The winds blow keen around it, and the rains fall heavy on it just now, and he may be a thankful man if, when his occupancy draws to a close, he can say, have done nothing to hasten the fall

thereof.

III. MAGEEIANA.

I have but little space left in which to quote some samples of the Archbishop's style, when writing freely with unreserve to an intimate friend. Canon MacDonnell has certainly produced an unique biography which, as he says, is almost an autobiography, from the fact that it is little more than one long compost of the Archbishop's own letters written without restraint to an intimate friend. Many of the letters are avowedly a blowing off of steam, and for many who are now living it would be as well that some of the Bishop's flouts and jeers had been omitted. For instance, it is piquant, no doubt, to read Bishop Magee speaking of the present Dean of St. Paul's as the "Cleon of the Lower House," and sneering at Bishop (Piers) Claughton as one "who has poked his small person into a strife which he does not understand, and is not equal to." But it would have been a kinder thing if Canon MacDonnell, had omitted both passages. Another: it is not pleasant to read that Archbishop Magee described Canon Liddon as "a monk in petticoats," with a "merely feminine mind." His phrases are brilliant enough, and many of them will sting and burn, as, for instance, the remark that the saintly Primate, whom he describes in another place as "Old Lincoln," was as usual "inopportune and mischievous in the most saintly way."

Dean Stanley he describes as a "strangely fascinating, queer, solitary, sad bit of Church history"; but for vivid portraiture what can excel this picture of Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln, as he appeared at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society?—

Mark Pattison, essayist and reviewer, read the paper for discussion. Imagine the mummy of an opium-eater restored to life and dressed in the dinner dress of the nineteenth century; that is M. Pattison, rector of Lincoln College, frea thinker and free writer, but certainly not free speaker. He read in a dreary way a queer paper, the object of which was to prove the impossibility of dogma from the indefiniteness of words. He listened in silence to our criticisms, uttered a few sepulchral words in reply, and then seemed to vanish like a sceptical ghost. It was really very strange, and savoured to me greatly of opium.

He did not by any means spare his own class with his caustic pen:

"Our clergy here," he wrote in 1872, "are like an angry swarm of bees in defence of the damnatory clauses. Clergy in Convocation are like wet hay in a stack, the thicker you pack them the hotter they grow."

And another time, after sneering at the plea for promotion in clerical quarters, he wrote:

I wonder, do the parasites on the hind legs of a bluebottle make interest for promotion to the fore legs on a deatu vacancy?

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"The League promised £40 to the tenants in such a house for resisting eviction.

"Now I was the girl that split the policeman's head with a spade handle and I got nothing, and Bridget Malony got a lot of the money, and she only threw a little boiling water on him. I only want justice agin her!"

A sum of £30 was subscribed by a local league for the shooting of an obnoxious agent. The money was lodged with a trustee, who bolted with it.

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The man who had been told off for the job was heard to complain loudly of the rogue who had cheated an poor man" out of his money, adding, "I'd shoot the agent for £30 still, but bedad I'd shoot that trustee for nothing.”

He tells again the excellent story of Father Healy, who, being asked by Mr. Gladstone upon what principle the Roman Church offered soul-indulgence, saying when he was in Rome he was offered the indulgence for fifty francs. Father Healy replied, as the Archbishop quotes it, "Well, Mr. Gladstone, I do not want to go into theology with you, but all I can say is that if my Church offered you an indulgence for fifty francs, she let you off very cheap."

On another occasion he repeats the gossip that, when Mr. Parnell was at Hawarden, he offended the Gladstone family by not coming to breakfast at all, and by being twenty-five minutes late for dinner.

IV. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS.

There only remain to be added some general observations upon these two volumes. The book is in a measure unique, for it is almost the first time that an attempt has been made to reduce the narrative of the biographer in a biography to a vanishing point. No doubt the method has its advantages, but it can seldom be pursued owing to the fact that very few busy men have time or inclination to write so constantly to their friends concerning the events of every day.

It is to be feared also that if Canon MacDonnell's example were to become a precedent, a great deal of the freedom of private communication would be destroyed. If we were all to be perpetually asking ourselves how our correspondence would look in print, it would lose, of necessity, much of the natural freshness and charm which makes it valuable. Then again, the MacDonnell method renders it impossible to pose events with any regard to their true perspective. There are episo les in every life which are the most important, both from their influence on

individual character and from their bearing on the lives of others, which either from accident or the pressure of circumstances find no adequate record in the letters written at the time. Or it may be that the letters which would have given the whole story are far too sacredly intimate to be published even by a biographer with Canon MacDonnell's conception of what is permissible. Hence, we shall have biographies in which third-rate events will occupy firstrate places for no other reason than that the third-rate event was described in a publishable letter with much detail, while the first-rate event was either not described at all, or was treated in letters toɔ confidential to be made public. The second observation which these handsome volumes suggest to the reader is the extraordinary triviality of many of the questions which twenty years ago profoundly exercised clerical minds. In Magee's letters we see a great deal more of the dust raised by the machine than we do of the real good work which it was accomplishing.

There are comparatively few subjects which the average reader will regard as of abiding interest in the voluminous dissertations from the Archbishop's pen which are preserved by his biographer. There is, however, one very interesting paper upon Confession and Absolution in the Church of England. There is another, which is "rote sarkastic," which, to a great many persons, would seem to state with unanswerable force the arguments in favour of terminating painlessly apparently useless lives which are slowly ebbing out in torture.

On the whole, the book leaves a vivid impression of a strong man who signally failed to comprehend the signs of the times, and whose native humour and shrewd mother wit failed to dispel the gloomy foreboding of catastrophe which seems always to have darkened his horizon. It is only here and there that you get glimpses of his religious life. The biography gives the idea of a man who was very much more occupied in serving tables and attending to the machine than one whose mind was fixed upon the things not of this world, and who dwelt much on the spiritual forces which alone are eternal.

This, however, is probably due to the method by which the biography has been built up, and that constitutes one other point in the least of the general objections which might be taken to the adoption of the MacDonnell method in biography.

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