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posure of nineteen; but it is a very curious utterance in the light of after-years.

Tait was throughout his life a fortunate man. At twenty-three he became a Fellow of his college. The reader does not need to be reminded what the period was in which this young man entered active and responsible life, for the air has recently been agitated by too many echoes and revivals of that exciting time to leave any one who has any title to the qualifications of reader, in oblivion of Tract xc., and all the tumults which arose from it. We confess for our own part that all the interesting subtleties of the mind of Newman, and his picturesque position, which is so dazzling as to confound the judgment, do not conciliate us to this much-discussed tract, and that the plain man’s simple inability to see how he could “write one thing and mean another” is to ourselves much more sympathetic. We do not, however, intend to enter upon this question, which has already been so widely discussed, except to note that by the date 1841, at which it was issued, Tait at thirty was in so influential a position, as Senior Tutor of his college, as to be able to inspire and lead the Protest of the Four Tutors, the first strong barrier put up against that wonderful and exuberant flood. It was in Oxford, at least, the unpopular side to take. His own generation was drawn away to a great degree by that romantic and attractive influence, and some of his own most intimate friends were deeply influenced by it, and for life. Tait called no names, imputed no motives, at this or any other time; but he set himself like a rock against the current which, in his plain and strong judgment, was sweeping onward not only to theological changes of the most radical description, but to what was of even greater importance, a loosening of the common bonds of truth and honour. He was not, perhaps, of the form of intelligence which can understand these subtle deflections, or harmonise them with any rule of morals. He believed black to be black and white to be white in such things, even though in practical life he was ever (perhaps) too much disposed to prefer the practicable grey in practical matters. This was his first public act; and there is no doubt that to be one of the Four Tutors was not, in his especial world, to commend one’s self to popular admiration and liking. It almost cost him his wife, the helpmeet who was so truly adapted to him, and of so much importance in his after-life. Fortunately so temperate in its strength was this first public utterance that it did not cost him his friends, although the natural progress of events and opinions carried many of them in a direction so different from his that familiar intercourse became less and less possible.

One of the best things in this admirably compiled book is the account given by Dean Lake of Durham of his lifelong friend at different periods of his career, which are at once graphic and understanding. Tait was his tutor, though but a few years older than himself, and impressed his friend early with an appreciation of unusual qualities. “He was then” (on leaving Oxford) “a man of marked character rather than of the genius which distinctly influences others—thoroughly Scotch in its independence, its caution, and its reserve of expression, but also with a reserve of power which belonged to the man himself—a character which was sure to grow.”