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pressing an authority to which he was himself indifferent—he stood too much on the power of the bishops, and their right to enforce subjection—a power which seems to crumble away at the first assertion, and finds nothing but rebellion where submission ought to be. But the almost faultless temper and simple dignity of the man are admirably preserved through all, and we are made to see him in his plain dutifulness, without exaggeration, and with no adventitious interest or romantic light of enthusiasm thrown upon his plain but powerful career and character. It is by a simple truth, almost more impressive than art, that this result has been attained, and it is one highly creditable to the joint authors of this important biography.

Archbishop Tait was reproached to the very end of his life by his opponents for his Presbyterian mind,—a curious accusation to be brought against one who held his office so high. But anger is not discriminating, and perhaps what these critics meant was that he had an impartiality of judgment and broad sympathy, which his more fully developed among those who have close relations with members of another communion than among those who have been trained to believe that the kingdom of God is to be found only in their own. He had not a Presbyterian mind. His mind, we should say, was strongly Episcopalian, prelatic, loving above all things the sober authority of the Episcopate, a thing conventionally odious to Presbyterians. But he had the absence of prejudice which is natural to a man acquainted by absolute knowledge with the high mind and noble lives which can exist in a region of spiritual consciousness quite different from his own. The son of a religious and good Presbyterian is not likely to consider his father’s house as cut off from spiritual life because the Apostolical succession is not a doctrine held in it. To this divergence of his life from its original atmosphere he probably owed his extreme toleration and desire to reach a basis of agreement whenever that might be possible, and to oppose all violent measures with his utmost strength. This, unfortunately, is by no means a characteristic of the Presbyterian mind, which is as little addicted by nature to toleration as any mind can be; but a fiery assailant in a Church paper, or a red-hot curate at a High Church assemblage, was not likely to pause upon that.

Archibald Campbell Tait came of one of those excellent yet unremarkable families who are the strength and the salt of national life—well-born, in the best sense of the word, of previous generations of educated and responsible men and women—well-bred, at once in the fundamental sense of a life bound to serious occupation and service to mankind, and in the superficial sense of “the best education,” though he had always something of the Scotch indifference to recondite scholarship. His election to a scholarship at Balliol (where he had gone a short time before as Snell scholar) seems to have at once determined his career, turning him into the more highly cultivated paths of English ecclesiasticism from those homelier ways in which he had been born. It is curious, however, to note that his family had, up to the time of his own father, been Episcopalian, belonging to one of the old remnants of the Church which had never yielded to the form of doctrine and discipline established in Scotland at the Revolution, Very easy and