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"hardly one has left his mark in history" | profit of their servants, and ordered the ex(p. 69).

"After the long episcopate of Thomas Kemp followed a rapid line of prelates, mostly undistinguished, and who passed over the throne of London to higher places" (p. 111).

"The majestic figure of Wolsey passes, on more than one occasion, over the pavement of St. Paul's (p 175). (Mentioned as if by way of contrast.)

"The Bishops of London during the reign of King James I. (with two exceptions) were not men of great distinction even in their own day" (pp. 315, 319).

"Before the Elizabethan Reformation, the Deans of St. Paul's (with three exceptions) left no mark on their age, and have sunk into oblivion" (p. 322).

"Of the eight bishops who filled the see of London during the eighteenth century, three only have left a name. . . The rest were decent, worthy prelates, and from their quiet thrones have sunk into quiet oblivion" (p. 456). "There was then (1761-1777) a rapid succession of decent prelates, who no doubt discharged their functions with quiet dignity, and lived their blameless lives in respect and in esteem" (p. 464).

A leading charm in all Dean Milman's writings, is their chastened humour and urbanity; and especially the gentle irony through which he suggests a regret or disapprobation which he does not wish to express:

"Dr. Hampden, who... promised to be the English historian of this remarkable chapter in the history of the human mind, has sunk into a quiet bishop" (Hist. Lat. C. ix. 101, note, ed. 1864).

"I have read the splendid quarto volume of M. Carle, Histoire de la Vie et des Ecrits de S. Thomas d'Aquin, of which I much admire the -type" (ib. 137, note).

24 Bishop Fitz James had watched with keen jealousy all Colet's proceedings, and with still gathering alarm at the popularity of the Dean. The Bishop reposed in pleasant indolence at Fulham (except for an occasional persecution") St. Paul's, p. 121). He had just before called Fitz James แ one of those high-born churchmen, piously ignorant and conscientiously blind,

with whom a hair's-breadth deviation from established usage and opinion is insolence, sin, worse than sin--heresy" (p. 120).

"Many causes conspired to break up this magnificent theory of cathedral worship. Throughout the good old rule prevailed, that there should be one to perform the duty while the other secured the emoluments" (p. 134).

King John of France "gave the Dean five florin nobles, of which the petty canon officiating had his share. What share we are not told" (p. 152).

"It appears that the audacious vergers and bell-ringers of the Cathedral had the evil habit of appropriating to themselves the countless wax-lights and tapers, after they had burned long enough on the shrines and tombs. The Dean and Canons put an end to this godless

tinguished lights to be carried to a room under the chapter-house, and there melted for the benefit of the Dean and Residentiaries" (p. 154).

"The whole body of St. Mellitus, of which the Cathedral once boasted, seems to have dwindled down to his two arms, one large and one small" (p. 155).

"The Ritualist of our day may read in Dugdale-if he can read for tears of fond but vain regret-the pages which recount the gorgeous robes," etc. (p. 229).

Granting that every side should be well represented in the conflict of opinion, it is every way a gain that the party of progress and freedom should have had a representative like Milman, the graces of whose style had a tendency to deprive opposition of its sting. Vehement as he sometimes was in condemning past abuses, yet when dealing with the more exciting topics of existing controversies, his style more commonly exemplified the balanced judgment, which was free from the impatience and precipitancy by which popular verdicts are too often degraded. It is the danger of popular leaders to be irritable and captious; sometimes overeager,-sometimes, on the other hand, too cold and unsympathizing. Dean Milman showed no wish to lead at all. But whenever his position and pronounced opinions forced him to the front, he brought a temper to the contest which seemed all but faultless. He always declared himself to be peculiarly averse to ecclesiastical controversy. He shows it by waiving off disputed questions with a courteous smile, rather than an eager contradiction. As one might say, he rather bows out an opponent, than dismisses him with rude decision. Thus he had no love for "the sterile debates of Convocation" (p. 289), which he shows by saying that "St. Paul's acquiesces, with more than submission, in the loss of her ancient dignity," by its removal to Westminster (p. 179). He has as little belief in the value of its censorial judgments; so he remarks, on the condemnation passed upon a book of Bishop Hare's, that "it must be supposed that the censure of Convocation had the same effect then as now. The copy of the obnoxious work now before me is of the ninth edition" (p. 459.) We may observe, throughout his notices of the Reformation, how quickly his temper resumes its habitual balance, after it has been stirred by the excesses of either party. "The worst enemies of the Reformation were," he says, "the Reformers" (p. 220). Yet "if the Reformers saw not how or where to draw the fine and floating and long obscured line between religion and superstition, who shall dare to arraign them?" (p. 231.) On one side, again, let us not transfer the blame for

a hateful policy to the present Roman Cath- | equally false, and by the magistrate as equally olics; "they have a right to cast off the ter- useful" (i. 165, ed. 1854). Compare the rible heritage bequeathed to them by darker following sentence of Dean Milman's:ages" (p. 295). On another side, let us not "The sins of the citizens of London must "avouch" too readily "Mr. Buckle's dismal have been surprisingly light, the penances view of the religion of Scotland;" though surprisingly easy, or their faith surprisingly "there is too much truth in the darker weak, if from this time the cathedral was part," he "deliberately closed his eyes to all wanting in ample and copious support" (St. its better influences" (p. 269, note). He Paul's, p. 160). It would be difficult to dekindles into enthusiasm when he speaks of cide from the isolated quotations, whether the advantages which have flowed from the Gibbon or Milman wrote such sentences as Royal supremacy in England, pointing out the following:-" I believe in the columns, with gratitude how "it has saved" the Eng- I doubt the inscription, and I reject the pedlish Church "from sacerdotalism in both igree" (Gibbon, v. 121, note). "The past its forms," as well from episcopal as from he regretted, he was discontented with the presbyterian Hildebrandism; how it "has present, and the future he had reason to settled down into the supremacy of law-law dread” (vi. 23). "The rector of Honiton administered by ermine, not by lawn, by has more gratitude than industry, and more dispassionate judges, by a national court of industry than criticism" (vii. 350, note). justice; not by a synod of Bishops and a Froissart "read little, inquired much, and clamorous Convocation" (p. 269). believed all" (viii., 32, note.) We often find sentences as terse in Milman :-" Faith makes martyrs; fanaticism makes martyrs; logic makes none" (St. Paul's, p. 96). But as a general rule they are lengthier and less condensed in their construction. "The slow, perhaps not yet complete, certainly not gene ral, development of a rational and intellec tual religion" (Hist. Christ., i. 47. "Now what was the clear, I may say the manifest, I may almost say the declared aim and object of the framers of our Articles?" (Fraser, March, 1865, p. 274.) "Men have begun to doubt, men are under the incapacity of believing, men have ceased to believe, the absolutely indispensable necessity of the intervention of any one of their fellow-creatures between themselves and the mercy of God" (Hist. Lat. Christ., ix. 354).

But we are diverging too soon from the consideration of his style, with its peculiarities, which invite further comment before we pass to deeper questions. It is instructive to compare it with the style of Gibbon, on whose pages he was long and usefully employed as commentator, before he happily assumed the position of an equal. He seemed to catch a reflection from the mind with which he was so long in contact; though indeed his varied sympathies have veined his pages with reminiscences of many other writers. When he tells us, for instance, that Edmund Rich fled from the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and ended by "sinking into a saint" (p. 47), we are reminded of Byron's line, "The hero sunk into the king." When he speaks of the "dreary November day" on which a Coun- Here is a different kind of sentence, cast cil gathered at St. Paul's (p. 49), or of "the in another of Gibbon's familiar moulds :dull, dubious light of a November day" (p." The productiveness of the shrine may ac 492), we suspect, perhaps more doubtfully, an echo from the style of Mr. Froude (e.g., H. E. vi. 283-7). It would be easy to pick out sentences which are tinged with the peculiar rhetoric of Lord Macaulay. But Gibbon is the writer to whom, in this as in many other respects, he bears the closest relation. Not that he was in any sense a servile imitator. His burnished paragraphs, his mazes of parenthetical clauses, his complex constructions, are peculiarly his own. His style is less monotonous than that of Gibbon. His rhetoric is in general as much more flexible as his tone is invariably more pure. It was Gibbon's favourite habit to cast bis epigrams into the form of triplets; as in the familiar instance where he says that "the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered as equally true, by the philosopher as

And

count for the richness and vitality of the legend. The legend no doubt fostered the unfailing opulence of the shrine" (St. Paul's, p. 12). Compare Gibbon :--" Persuasion is the resource of the feeble, and the feeble can seldom persuade" (viii. 147). compare Macauley, passim; e.g. :--" The error of judging the present by the past, and the error of judging the past by the present" (H. E. ii. 236). He followed Gibbon also in many of his Latinisms, sometimes of word and sometimes of construction; in his inversions of clauses so ill suited to the genius of a comparatively uninflected language; and especially in his omission of conjunctions in enumerations of particulars--a habit which grew on Milman, if we mistake not, in his later writings, and produced something of the unpleasant effect of a mannerism. In Gibbon's Memoirs of his Life and Writ

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ings he describes his mode of composition But it is time to pass to broader features thus::-"It has always been my practice to than these minor details of construction. In cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to one of his notes he praises Gibbon for the try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memo-"vigour, rapidity, fulness, and exactness but to suspend the action of the pen till with which he had drawn the history of the I had given the last polish to my work" Paulicians (H. L. C. v. 399). The terms (p. 104). We have not yet been favoured might have been chosen to describe what with Dean Milman's autobiography, if it ex- seems to have been his own ideal. They cerists, and we have no personal acquaintance tainly suggest the leading excellencies which with his literary habits; but so far as the he ever sought to realize. He evidently paragraphs themselves are evidence, we thought much of rapidity of movement. In should conclude that in writing them out he a part of one of his old prefaces which we departed widely from Gibbon's example, un- have not observed in the reprint, he apololess his ear was set to an unusual rhythm. gized for brevity on the ground that he was He rather gives the impression of one who bound" to keep up the rapidity of his narcrowds in his thoughts and facts as he is rative." Thus be always carries on his readwriting, or who even interlines them after er from one point to another with springing his sentences are finished. The following is and elastic step. "I trace rapidly the hisno unusual instance of the mode in which tory of Eastern Christianity until the reunhis data are packed together by parentheses: ion with the West ;" and then in a few pages, -"On the trial of Rogers in St. Mary Ov- "We are again in the West, reascending ery (Southwark), (he had been imprisoned and passing in review Latin Christianity and in Newgate), Gardiner the Chancellor (South- its primates" (ib. i. 305, 320). Such rapidity, wark was in the diocese of the Bishop of in fact, was an essential condition of such fulWinchester) began the examination with the ness. A slow and lingering guide could never question of the Papal Supremacy" (p. 242). have conducted the reader through the He intercalates in the same way even in his "vast circumference" of the history, in shortest sentences:-"In 1596 (he was born which, as Dean Stanley says, he has embraced in 1573) Donne embarked with the expedi- "the whole story of medieval Europe."+ tion of the Earl of Essex to Spain" (p. 324). "Their attachment (a secret marriage took place) endured to the end of their lives "(ib.) We might copy from these Annals of St. Paul's complex examples which sometimes fill a whole entangled paragraph; but it can scarcely be doubted that the more exaggerated specimens would have been smoothed out on the revision of the press.

Let us note yet one other minor characteristic, the way in which, like an energetic speaker, he repeats a word again and again, with emphatic additions, till he has succeeded in driving it home upon the hearer:-"Colet and Erasmus were in some respects closely kindred: "-the word is repeated at the head of at least six fervid sentences. Amongst other things they were "kindred in their contempt for that grovelling superstition which, especially under the countless degenerate, ignorant, obstinate, arrogantly ignorant monks and friars, had suffocated the higher truths of religion" (p. 112). Savonarola was "a monk, an impassioned monk, an Italian visionary monk, a fervent medieval Catholic" (p. 114). In Ridley's disputation at Oxford, on questions where "there ought to have been the most perfect knowledge," etc., "there the worst of ignorance, learned ignorance, was to decide, aided by the shouts of a rabble of monks, of monk-taught men, and boys mank-educated, if it may be called education" (p. 246.)

His vigour, again, like most valuable qualities, was reflected, as we may imagine, on his writings from his life. It is instructive to mark the eager interest with which, as his notes show, he caught at all new books, worked up all fresh knowledge, and availed himself even of the least kindred sciences— of geology, for example, to illustrate the foundation of St. Paul's (p. 406). His keen sympathies enabled him to find living attractions even in quarters that might have seemed least promising. Among the many charmed spectators of the Ammergau mystery-play in 1860, few can have been more remarkable than that distinguished old man, bending under the weight of nearly seventy years, as he watched, with an eye trained to every form of excellence, and a temper most averse to medieval superstition, the mode in which merc peasants discharged a task of the utmost delicacy and difficulty. "During my early life," he says, "I have seen the drama in all its forms, as exhibited in the most splendid theatres of Europe. I have never witnessed a performance more striking from its scenic effect. . . . There was nothing, I think, which could offend the most sensitive religiousness. . . . I never passed a day (it lasted from seven in the morning till three

*There is a keen analysis of that chapter of Gibbon in Newman on Development, p. 190 seq.

Lectures on the Eastern Church, vol. i. Întrod. p. xxxi.i.

What precision of observation and rapidi ty of combination are shown in the following summary of the characteristics of the chief English cathedrals :—.

in the afternoon) in more absorbed and un-stroy all faith in the whole account of the Perwearied attention" (H. L. C. ix. 180, note). sian invasion by our venerable Herodotus. Di With these characteristics we may con- odorus, with all that we know of Ctesias and nect his custom of making life the great test that class, must follow. Niebuhr and Sir George of excellence in composition. In the outset in the sacrifice of Livy. I must confess that I Lewis, if they agree in nothing else, must agree of his chief work, he promises that it shall have some fear about Cæsar himself. At all "at least attempt to fulfil the two great events, there must be one wide sweep of, I functions of history,-to arrest the mind and think, the whole of Oriential history" (Pref. carry it on with unflagging interest; to infix to Hist. of Jews. 1863, p. xxxi). its whole course of events on the imagination and the memory, as well by its broad and definite landmarks, as by the life and reality of its details in each separate period" (H. L. C. i. 21). Speaking of popular or "Are we to mourn with unmitigated sorrow ballad poetry he writes:--"Its whole excelover the demolition of old St. Paul's? Of Eng lence is in rapidity of movement, short, sud-land's more glorious cathedrals, it seems to me, den transition . . . in, above all, life, unreposing, unflagging, vigorous, stirring life" Memoir of Lord Macaulay, p. 19). And of Macaulay's own style he says, that "the vigour and life were unabating" (ib. p. 22). He applies the same test on kindred subjects, such as Painting. Thus of the angels, etc., in Fra Angelico's pictures he writes:"Not merely do they want the breath of life, the motion of life, the warmth of life; they want the truth of life, and without truth there is no consummate art. They have never really lived, never assumed the functions nor dwelt within the precincts of life' (H. L. C. ix. 338). And of mosaic :-"The interlaying of small pieces cannot altogether avoid a broken, stippled, spotty effect: it cannot be alive." But after a time, "the religious emotions which the painter strove to excite in others would kindle in himself, and yearn after something more than the cold immemorial language. By degrees the hard flat lineaments of the countenance would begin to quicken themselves," etc.; the mummy would begin to stir with life" (ib. 327-9). Of his fulness and exactness numerous illustrations could be given from passages where his well-stored memory and swift hand enabled him to sweep together illustrations from distant quarters, so as to condense, as it may be said, an essay into a page. It is thus that he enlivens a dry subject--the difficulties presented by the numbers in the He brew Scriptures :—

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"If accuracy in numbers is to determine the historical credibility and value of ancient writers, there must be a vast holocaust offered on

the stern altar of historic truth. Josephus must first be thrown upon the hecatomb with out hope of redemption. Bishop Thirlwall and Mr. Grote must lead up, with averted eyes, the first-born of Grecian history. The five millions and a quarter in the army of Xerxes must de* He knew the value of mosaic in its proper place,

and would have employed it, as it seems, to replace the paintings inside the dome of the Cathedral.

St. Paul's, pp. 436, 441, 496, note.

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I confess, none could be so well spared....
Old St. Paul's had nothing of the prodigal
magnificence, the harmonious variety of Lin-
coln, the stately majesty of York, the solemn
grandeur of Canterbury, the perfect sky-aspir-
ing unity of Salisbury. It had not even one of
boast of some of our other churches; neither
the great conceptions which are the pride and
the massy strength of Durham, 'looking eter-
nity' with its marvellous Galilee, nor the
tower of Gloucester, nor the lantern of Ely, nor
the rich picturesqueness of Beverley, nor the
deep-receding, highly decorated arches of the
Even in its
west front of Peterborough.
immediate neighbourhood, though wanting a
central tower, and its western towers, not too
successfully afterwards added by Sir Christo-
pher Wren, the Abbey, with its fine soaring col
umns, its beautiful proportions, its solemn, grey,
diapered walls,-the Abbey, with its intricate
chapels, with its chambers of royal tombs, with
Henry VII.'s chapel, an excrescence indeed, but
in sufficient harmony with the main building,
ed by its richly fretted roof,-the Abbey of
in itself an inimitable model of its style, crown-
Westminster would have put to perpetual shame
the dark, unimpressive pile of the city of Lon-
don: Westminster modestly reposing in its low-
er level,-St. Paul's boastfully loading its more
proud, but more obtrusive eminence." (St.
Paul's, p. 388.)

One more characteristic before we close
the subject of his style. He never forgot
that he was a poet. Every now and then
his prose rises into a strain of poetry, which
gives to his descriptive passages a colouring
of rich and gorgeous beauty. Take an in-
stance from his account of the death of Otho
III., than which "no Nemesis more awful
ever darkened the stage of Greece." Ste-
phania, the widow of Crescentius, had been
the victim of the basest usage.
stern self-command she suppressed her in-
dignation, her loathing, within her heart.
At the end of three years she had nursed up
Otho himself, the religious Otho, was caught
her fatal beauty to its old exquisite lustre.
in her toils, which she spread with consum
mate art." Through the poison which she ad

"With

lake was studded with boats and barks, conveying the bishops and abbots, the knights and grave burghers, of the Tyrol, of Eastern and Black Forest and Thuringia. Along the whole Northern Germany, Hungary, and from the course of the Rhine, from Cologne, even from Brabant, Flanders, or the farthest North, from England and from France, marched prelates, abbots, doctors of law, celebrated schoolmen, following the upward course of the stream, and gathering as they advanced new hosts from the provinces and cities to the east or west. Day after day the air was alive with the standards of princes, and the banners emblazoned with the armorial bearings of sovereigns, of nobles, of knights, of imperial cities; or glittered with the silver crosier, borne before some magnificent bishop or mitred abbot. Night after

ministered, "the hand of death was upon the bright, hopeful youth." "Heaven, it is to be hoped was more merciful than the wife of Crescentius. Deeply must Otho, cut off at the age of twenty-two years, have rued his fatal connexion with Rome" (H. L. C. iii. 346-7). Or take an instance from his picture of Langue doc before the fatal crusade against the Albigenses; of Languedoc," the land of that melodious tongue first attuned to modern poetry," where "life was a perpetual tournament or feast;" where "religion was chivalry, but. chivalry becoming less and less religious;", where "the cities had risen in opulence and splendour;" where "literature, at least poetry, had begun to speak to the prince and to the people," "-"the song and the music in the cas-night the silence was broken by the pursuivants tle hall, at the perpetual banquet," while "the chant in the castle chapel was silent or unheard." "So basked the pleasant land in its sunshine; voluptuousness and chivalrous prodigality in its castles, luxury and ease in its cities: the thunder-cloud was far off in the horizon." (ib.v. 404-7). For a longer example of his descriptive power we may turn to his account of the gathering of the multitudes to the Council of Constance (ib. viii. 227-9):"In June the quiet streets of ancient Constance were disturbed by the first preparations for the great drama which was to be performed within her walls." "In Angust came the Cardinal of Viviers, the Bishop of Ostia, with a distinguished suite, to take order for the accommodation of the Pope and of his cardinals. From that period to the Feast of All Saints, the day named for the opening of the Council, and for several months after, the converging roads which led to this central city were crowded

with all ranks and orders, ecclesiastics and laymen, sovereign princes and ambassadors of soVereigns, archbishops and bishops, the heads or representatives of the great monastic orders, theologians, doctors of canon or of civil law, delegates from renowned universities, some with splendid and numerous retainers, some like trains of pilgrims, some singly and on foot. With these, merchants, traders of every kind and degree, and every sort of wild and strange vehicle. It was not only, it might seem, to be a solemn Christian council, but an European congress, a vast central fair, where every kind of commerce was to be conducted on the bold

est scale, and where chivalrous or histrionic or other common amusements were provided for idle hours and for idle people. It might seem a final and concentrated burst and manifestation of medieval devotion, medieval splendor, medieval diversions;-all ranks, all orders, all pursuits, all professions, all trades, all artisans, with their various attire, habits, manners, language, crowded to one single city.

"On the steep slope of the Alps were seen winding down, now emerging from the autumntinted chestnut groves, now lost again, the rich cavalcades of the cardinals, the prelates, the princes of Italy, each with their martial guard or their ecclesiastical pomp. The blue spacious

and trumpeters announcing the arrival of some high and mighty count or duke, or the tinkling mule-bells of some lowlier caravan. The streets were crowded with curious spectators, eager to behold some splendid prince or ambassador, some churchman famous in the pulpit, in the school, in the council, it might be in the battlefield, or even some renowned minnesinger, or popular jongleur."

We pass with some reluctance from the quiet province of literary criticism to the less inviting controversies in which Dean Milman was from time to time unwillingly engaged. His three historical works bore more or less directly on three such controversies, each connected with and to some extent overlapping the others: the Divine authority of Scripture, the supernatural element in Church history, and the claims of dogma to be regarded as the chief condition

of Church union.

1. As a representative of the more free interpretation of Scripture, he lived to remind us how much times have changed since his own position, at least in England, seemed to lie on the extremest frontier. The rising tide rolled far beyond him long before his death. It is curious to turn back to the indignant reclamations of the old British Critic in 1830, or to the not altogether needless warnings which Dr. Faussett addressed to the University of Oxford in his sermon against the History of the Jews. The weakest point in his assault upon him was the common one, of not knowing exactly where the real danger lay, and of mingling childish and trivial charges with retorts which still retain their grave importance. His chief external offence was the studied freshness of his language; the attempt to realize more vividly the sacred scenes and narratives by bringing "fresh eyes" to bear upon them, and by expressing Scripture his tory in less formal and conventional phrases. In this respect the startling novelties of 1829 have become the mere commonplaces

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