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great truths which are fact, in the lives of men, the records of the good and great, are more than fiction. Indeed every life is an epic in its kind, often not very capable of the telling, often so twisted up with other lives as to be indistinguishable amid the warp and woof of humanity, often demanding too much elucidation and explanation to be a practicable story; but always the most interesting among all the methods of literature when the necessary conditions of that expository agent can be fulfilled.

The life of Archbishop Tait^[1] might not appear at the first glance one which would much attract the general reader. That it means the history of the Church of England in his time has been said with much truth; and tired as we are by squabbles and trials—by the hideous invention of the aggrieved parishioner on the one side, and the half-theatrical martyr in prison on the other, who is like the prisoner of the Vatican in voluntary durance, because he will give in to no man, specially not to his bishop—we are perhaps not deeply anxious to read, before it settles well into the past, the history of the Church of England. We confess, on our own part, to a great reluctance to tackle the lives of contemporary public men, which are chiefly a record of public events a little too old for immediate interest—having had that so recently at first hand—and much too young for history. But there is much more in Archbishop Tait’s life than a mere narrative of ecclesiastical progress during the last fiftty years. It is not a work of genius: the writers have not, perhaps, been able, or even attempted, to present to us one of those vivid portraits that illuminate an age, or make a single figure stand out as if painted by Titian. Such achievements are very rare, and demand a great artist. And perhaps Tait was not the man for such a portrait. But there is here not only a most excellent narrative of the events in his life, with their great influence on the history of the time, but a clear grave image of the man as he lived and as he died, consistent, never losing a strong personal identity, such as is thoroughly satisfactory to the mind. Higher colour would not have been appropriate to the subject. It has not the relief of the Archbishop’s robes, the red-and-white which tempts the painter, but is entirely set forth In those more serious tones which are the usual clothing of men in an undecorative age. But the grave personality, the individual character, is never lost, “A still strong man in a blatant land,” is the best description that can be given of the portrait thus set before us. The Archbishop was not faultless; he had his weaknesses, as characteristic as his strength. Sometimes his moderation was, though it seems a contradiction in terms, carried too far. He was mistaken, perhaps, in some of his measures. He would scarcely be a man if this was not the case. By times he was too anxious to find the practicable juste milieu—the compromise that would work. By times, perhaps—but this almost, as might be said, fictitiously, for the advantage of the Church,

1. ↑ Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury. By Randall T. Davidson, D.D., Dean of Windsor, and William Benham, B.D., Hon. Canon of Canterbury. Macmillan & Co., London.