walks through his widely-scattered parish, going into their cottages, learning their history, characters, and mutual relationships. In the pursuit of this knowledge he worked as thoroughly as he had done before at points of philosophy or history, and he retained it to the last, remembering the members of each family with an individual distinctness, and following its changes and sorrows with a` living interest. What he had learnt from Wordsworth, in the world of poetry,—reverence for the joys and griefs, the endurance and the devotion of English peasant life,-now became a reality within the range of his own experience. When he found what he recognised as a living faith and love in some girl dying of consumption in a cottage, or old woman bedridden for life with a broken limb, he looked at them with an enthusiastic admiration, and a desire to sit at their feet and learn from them. One such case, which impressed him deeply, occurred shortly after his arrival, and the feeling with which he regarded it found utterance in a sermon well known to his friends, On the Death of Phillis Hoad. With all this zeal and sympathy, however, his work among his people at Hurstmonceux was felt by him to be the least successful portion of his life's task. The original defect of training was never entirely surmounted. He loved them, and they loved him, and yet they never got thoroughly to know and understand each other. His thoughts and theirs ran in different grooves. He would sit by them, almost weeping in his sympathy, and yet found it hard to say the words they wanted, to talk to them about their ailments, to meet their religious difficulties. In such pastoral visits, accordingly, he was often silent and embarrassed. His people complained that he came and said little or nothing; when they learnt afterwards how much he had cared for them and their children, they looked with wonder and said,

not so.

"He never told us so." Nor was his work as a preacher altogether a successful one. His admiration for his brother's Sermons, and his abhorrence of what was trite, or conventional, or stiff, led him to aim at reproducing that type of discourse; and, for those who brought with them the power of following the workings of Hare's mind, there was often something singularly attractive in the union of great simplicity of language and homely imagery, with subtle associations of thought and the results of profound study. As sermons to be read, they will long retain the value which belongs to all utterances of a full and earnest mind. But for the majority of his hearers it was There was an effort in the simplicity which conveyed the impression that he was "preaching down" to them. To them, sermons often of fifty, sixty, seventy minutes were "mortal long and hard." The more homely the illustrations, the more entirely they misunderstood them. He spoke of the danger of men "playing at ninepins with Truth," and they thought he was warning young labourers against beer and skittles. He likened fiery controversialists to men who "walked with lucifer matches in their pockets," and the farmers thanked him for the zeal with which he watched over their farm-yards and stacks. He referred, by way of illustration, to the devotion of Italian peasants to the Madonna, and he was reported to have told his congregation that they ought to worship the Virgin Mary, and believe that she would bless them if they prayed to her. Some consciousness, it may be, of this difficulty of reaching his hearers led him at times to reproduce, with indefinite alterations in detail, some of Arnold's Sermons, or to adapt those of Andrewes or Leighton. His power for good in church was, perhaps, greater as a reader than a preacher. Few can forget and few could resist the effect of that rich voice, with its deep

mellow tones, its transparent earnestness, its perfect, because undramatic, emphasis, or the almost transfiguring brightness which in the more solemn moments and acts of worship lighted up his face.

In other ways, where his powers found a more fitting region to act in, he was able to work for the good of his own poor and those of neighbouring parishes. The New Poor Law, passed in 1834, had just come into operation, and was regarded there, as in other parts of England, with hatred and suspicion. The Rector of Hurstmonceux, who shared the views which his brother had expressed eight years before (Guesses, pp. 28—31), against the abuses of the old system, was anxious that the working of the new should not be hindered by needless harshness on blind stupidity, and, for that purpose, accepted a place on the Board of Poor Law Guardians for the Hailsham Union, and attended constantly at their weekly meetings. His doing so enabled him to mitigate the harshness of many measures which would otherwise have come into operation, but it of course exposed him to all the odium which rested on the administrators of the obnoxious law. It is worth recording, as a sample of what that law had to encounter, and of the powers of belief of the Sussex peasantry, that it was once reported through the parish, at this period, on the occasion of a school feast, that "Mr. Hare meant to get all the children together, and then put them into a boat and have them drowned in Pevensey Bay."

For a short time, from Trinity Sunday, 1834, to October, 1835, Hare had the satisfaction of having as his curate one of the pupils whom he most loved, and of whom he had the highest hopes. He has left on record, in his Life of John Sterling (p. liv.), how heartily he rejoiced in the presence of one in whom there was so much to admire

and sympathise with. The few months thus spent were indeed the golden time, in his own words, the " one Sabbath" of Sterling's life, a "bright and healthy contrast" to what went before and followed it. He came for a time under the contagion of religious zeal, and by his plans for the good of the poor, and the efforts and sacrifices which he made for them, won a place in their memories, as well as in that of his friend and teacher, from which they could not dislodge him, even after his name had become a byeword for the boldness of his intellectual speculations. Among those who followed him in his curacy, I may name the Rev. J. N. Simpkinson, Rector of Brington, and the Rev. E. Venables, Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Lincoln, as being indebted to them for many recollections of this period of Julius Hare's life, which they have kindly placed at my disposal.

The years of these parochial labours were not idle as regards the labours of the pen. A new edition of the Guesses was begun in 1837, and published in 1838. The work, however, gradually acquired a new character in the process of revision. Many parts were rewritten, much more added, essays of considerable length overshadowed the pithy, pregnant sentences which had before been its chief characteristic, and the share of the surviving brother in the work became consequently by far the larger. As it was, it was but a republication of the first volume, and was followed by a so-called Second Series (begun in 1838, but not published till ten years later), still gathering round that volume as their nucleus. One of the tasks which caused this delay was a metrical new version of the Psalms. Dissatisfied alike with Sternhold and Hopkins, and with Tate and Brady, he turned to the Scotch version with admiration for its

rough and sometimes uncouth simplicity, and made that the basis of his own. The result, though interesting to the student, can hardly be said to have been successful. I am not aware that it was ever adopted beyond the limits of his own parish, or that it has been used in any of the countless "Psalms and Hymns" which are to be found in our churches.

In 1839 he returned, though in a new character, to exert a yet fuller and wider influence on the University which he loved. The Victory of Faith Sermons, which he delivered as Select Preacher in that year, are remembered by many Cambridge men as among the epochmarking events of their lives. He had been long enough away from Cambridge for his reputation to acquire the larger proportions which are sometimes the result of absence, not long enough to be forgotten. He was known to have mastered many regions of theological study on which few others had ventured, and believed to occupy a position which was neither that of the Evangelical or the then prominent Tractarian school, nor yet simply intermediate between them. Newman's Lectures on Justification by Faith had recently appeared, and were leading many to disparage what had been looked on as the Articulus stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ, and with it the great name of Luther had lost its hold on their reverence. The starting-point of Hare's Sermons was his protest against what he believed to be a step backwards towards the theology of Rome, a re-assertion of the great truth of which Luther had borne witness. Had they been, however, only a dogmatic vindication of the formula of Protestantism, they would not have had the effect which they actually had then and afterwards on the many minds who feel that they owe much, even "their own selves," to them. The publication of these Sermons