was easier than it is for ourselves to discern the enduring outlines of intellectual and imaginative truth. The third source of authority is our own Constitution, which, as the fountain of our laws and customs, has obviously been the paramount factor in moulding the peculiarities of the English character. Moreover, these three sources of English life and thought are all fused and harmonized together; not one of them can be considered independently, and without regard to its relations with the others. With reference to the continuity of tradition, and the point in the course of our national growth which we actually occupy, we ought to have some practical acquaintance with the society about us, and a historic knowledge of the different stages through which English art and literature have previously passed. Above all, we would strongly urge the artists of the rising generation to study the work of their predecessors in the eighteenth century. We know that this is an unpopular opinion. We are aware that both Catholics and Radicals say with Joseph de Maistre, in the words quoted in our last number, 'Il faut absolument tuer l'esprit du dix-huitième siècle.' The former say so because the eighteenth century witnessed on the Continent the momentary triumph of the philosophy of the Revolution over the traditions of the Monarchy and the Church. The Radicals hate the eighteenth century because the spirit of its society and letters was aristocratic. And doubtless on the Continent the unmitigated conflict of antagonistic extremes makes the sentiment perfectly intelligible. But this is not the case in England. For us the eighteenth century is the bridge between medieval feudalism and modern democracy, and therefore a historical position from which we can best study the opposing elements of our constitutional life. It was the first century of constitutional compromise; the age when our liberties were secured, and the foundations of our empire laid in all parts of the world; when Christianity was freely assailed by hosts of deists and infidels, but when it was defended by the 'Analogy' of Butler; when the social idiom of the language was first fixed; when the finest humourists in our literature appeared; when the first of our political writers, the prince of our critics, the best of our biographers, and the greatest of our historians lived and died. In a word, there is not one of our nineteenth century interests which cannot be traced in a simpler state of existence in the eighteenth century. A reverent study of this earlier stage of our national existence will enable each individual to understand more clearly the thoughts and feelings which he perceives in his own mind, and may suggest to the artist ideas which, while animated by original genius, may also bear the hereditary stamp of the English character. G 2

ART.

ART. III.-Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., Lord Bishop of Oxford and afterwards of Winchester, with Selections from his Diaries and Correspondence. By A. R. Ashwell, M.A., late Canon of the Cathedral, and Principal of the Theological College, Chichester. In three volumes. Vol. I. London, 1880.

OF

F certain ecclesiastics in every age it may be declared with truth that to write their lives adequately would be to write the ecclesiastical history of the times in which they lived. Churchmen of a generation which is already fast dying out will bear witness that had the life been written of Hugh James Rose (1797-1839), it would have been nothing else but the history of the beginning of that great revival in the English Church, which the Hon. Thomas Grenville characterized as by far the most remarkable phenomenon which he had witnessed throughout his long career. With equal truth may it be declared that the subsequent history of the same great movement would be most intelligibly written by one who should construct an adequate biography of Samuel Wilberforce. But in the case of this last-with far less of learning and intellectual power-there concurred certain personal gifts of an altogether unique order. No Churchman within living memory -scarcely any Englishman-has enjoyed a larger share of personal celebrity than he. It would be easy to recal the names of men who eclipsed him by their achievements or by the brilliancy of their writings. But it remains a fact notwithstanding that as a public man Samuel Wilberforce, by the general suffrage of English society, was without a peer. During the last twenty years of his episcopate it was observed that no name more readily rose to the surface of conversation than his. Every one at a party had some characteristic story to tell concerning him: had been brought, in one way or other, into personal contact with him. It was impossible to resist the conviction that he was a man universally admired as well as universally known. Every one present at least had heard 'the Bishop of Oxford' preach, and had formed his opinion concerning the preacher. Who that had ever really come within the fascination of his personal influence failed to speak of him with a kind of admiration which bordered on enthusiasm?

His birth (in 1805) and his parentage have been often set before the public, and the peculiar atmosphere of religious thought in which his youthful character was formed has long since become a matter of history. But his biographer seems not to have been aware that, in conformity with those same

family traditions, one of the preceptors, to whose care the elder Wilberforce entrusted his son while quite a boy, was the wellknown Fry of Emberton,' who (marvellous to relate) was looked upon as a kind of apostle by the Clapham sect, and received into his rectory a limited number of sons of evangelical' parents. Among the number, it should be premised, was a lad of Hebrew extraction. A characteristic incident is still remembered of the Samuel Wilberforce of those early days. The scene of the boys' studies was a spacious apartment at the top of the house, where they were careful to relieve the tedium of acquiring the Latin language by giving free vent to their animal spirits, and occasionally making a tremendous noise. On one occasion, the disturbance overhead having become insufferable, old Fry (after repeated ineffectual warnings from below) rushed upstairs, cane in hand, kicked open the study door, and proceeded to wreak his wrath indiscriminately on the first offender he should meet. 'Sam,' quick as lightning, caught the youthful Israelite by the collar, slewed him round to receive, a tergo, the blow which must else have fallen to his own share, and pleaded, First the Jew, sir, then the Gentile.'

His brief but honourable career at Oriel (1823-1827) brought him into contact as a junior with a set of remarkable men, some of whom, for good or for evil, were destined to make an indelible impress on the Church of England at a turning-point of her history. His rooms were those on the ground-floor in the south-western corner of the quadrangle-rooms which were identified by himself in conversation more than forty years afterwards by the fact that the coal-hole was (and is) under the floor of the sitting-room. He had asked a friend, whose house he made his headquarters when Bishop of Winchester (Canon Bridges, of Beddington, also an Oriel man), to indicate to him, if he could, which rooms were occupied by his son. Bridges, after conducting him in thought to the locality above indicated, at last reached the trap-door over the coal-hole, 'Those were my rooms!' cried the Bishop, grasping his friend's arm, and swaying it backward and forward, as his manner was: Those were my rooms!'

When

In 1828 he was united to Emily Sargent, through failure of issue in whose two brothers the Lavington property eventually came to his family. Shortly before the melancholy accident which occasioned his own death in 1873, being on a visit in the neighbourhood of Marden (where the elder Wilberforce had once resided), it was arranged that the Bishop should take a ride through the Park with the daughter of his host next morning before breakfast. (He loved beyond all things an

outing before breakfast, if it were but a scamper round the garden.) 'We were sitting apart' (writes the friend who furnishes the incident), when Wilberforce suddenly said to me, in his quiet tone, "I met her there for the first time. She was thirteen, and I was fifteen, and we never changed our minds."

He made the first proof of his ministry at Checkendon, a quiet little country village near Henley-on-Thames, to the sole charge of which he was ordained in December 1828. Thence, at the end of sixteen months, he was transferred by Bishop Sumner of Winchester, his faithful friend and patron, to Brighstone, in the Isle of Wight. It was at Brighstone that he matured those powers and acquired those administrative habits for which he became afterwards so conspicuous; easily achieving for himself the foremost place among the clergy of the little island. But he was constantly in society, and much absent from his parish; being found now at Farnham, now at Winchester, now in London, now at Oxford. It appears from his Diary' that he was away for a full third of the year 1838. He had in fact already acquired an extraordinary reputation as a preacher and public speaker, and his powers were largely in request. At Winchester, in 1837,

'A great county meeting was held for the purpose of setting on foot a Diocesan Church Building Society, with the Duke of Wellington in the chair. Lord Palmerston was among the speakers; and in the course of his speech he took a line which Mr. S. Wilberforce considered inconsistent with true Churchmanship. The consequence was that he attacked Lord Palmerston's remarks with an ability and eloquence which quite carried away the meeting, but, at the same time, with a vehemence which caused some of those present to remonstrate with the Duke of Wellington, as chairman, for having allowed so young a clergyman to proceed unchecked. The Duke replied that it had occurred to him to interpose, but that on looking again at the speaker he felt sure that, had he done so, he would only have diverted upon himself the stream of his indignant eloquence, and, "I assure you," he added, "that I would have faced a battery sooner."-pp. 107-8.

Of the opportunities of access to London society which his frequent visits to Winchester House presented, Wilberforce freely availed himself. He even cultivated the friendship of men of a religious school alien alike to that to which he was drawn by force of early habit and the strength of family traditions, and to that within the sphere of whose influence his education at Oriel had inevitably brought him. The names of Maurice, Carlyle, Bunsen, recur constantly in his diary at this time. But he never identified himself with any school of religious

religious thought, though he touched them all, and evinced sympathies with each in turn. Towards Maurice and his party he never, in fact, had more than an intellectual leaning. From the phraseology and many of the conventionalities of 'Evangelicalism,' on the contrary, he never to the last hour of his life was able to shake himself entirely free. But his relation to the Oxford school was altogether peculiar. With undiminished reverence for the personal holiness of certain of its leaders, but with his eyes wide open to their besetting faults, he instinctively assimilated whatever in it he recognized as Catholic and true: while-unlike his brothers, Henry and Robert-whatever in it had a Romeward leaning he rejected from the first with unqualified abhorrence. He was greatly scandalized by the refusal of the leaders of the party to assist in the Martyrs' Memorial, which in consequence became a standing protest against the un-Anglican character which in the end was impressed upon the Oxford teaching. There is, indeed, no feature of the present biography more truly instructive than so much of Wilberforce's private correspondence and public utterances as relate to the remarkable movement which culminated in Mr. Newman's apostasy and the discreditable Ideal' of the Rev. W. G. Ward. Should it not in fairness be added that, in common with all other faithful men of the last generation, Samuel Wilberforce was probably indebted, to a greater extent than he was himself aware, to the religious atmosphere of Oxford during the memorable years of his undergraduateship?

To the same period of his life belongs his joint authorship with his brother Robert of the biography of the elder Wilberforce. This was succeeded by his history of the Church in America, and many lesser efforts-reviews, charges, sermons. He had already been appointed Archdeacon of Surrey and Canon of Winchester, and was now (1840) nominated one of Prince Albert's chaplains. In 1841 he was promoted to the important rectory of Alverstoke. He preached frequently before the Queen, and was acceptable at Court. brought him within a charmed circle: and the traits of character which he sometimes jots down in passing are of exceeding interest. With two short notices of Lord Melbourne, and a life-like sketch of Sir Robert Peel (July 5th, 1847), we shall hasten forward.

All this

All went on most pleasantly at the Castle: my reception and treatment throughout exceedingly kind. [Jan. 8, 1842.] The Queen and the Prince were both at church, as also was Lord Melbourne, who paid his first visit at the same time. The Queen's meeting with him was very interesting. The exceeding pleasure