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portions of it, was too much to be expected of the Bench of Bishops——although Bishop Tait, in his individual utterances, always distinguished between. When, however, the letter of the Bishop’s was published, Dr Temple, offended by his own apparent condemnation by his friend, and Dean Stanley, offended on Dr Temple’s account, both fell with the utmost violence upon their brother. The reader has seen how his friends lectured and snubbed him on his election to Rugby. They congratulated him on his appointment to London with a good deal of the same condescending encouragement, mingled with a half doubt of his capability for the distinguished post, which at the same time they considered him the best man to hold. This curious mixture of appreciation and superiority is apparent in all their intercourse with him. They were probably all the more ready to express what was in them, because the strong and quiet man took all their advices so sweetly, supported all their assumptions, and yet characteristically took his own way. At this particular moment the fiery little Dean—Canon as he was at the time—fell upon Tait like a small thunderbolt, followed by Dr Temple in deep resentment and the dignified civility of great wrath. The paragraph in the letter of Dr Temple beginning, “If you do not wish to alienate your friends, do not treat them as you have treated me,” is written not only in the language of resentment, which might have been natural, but de haut en bas, with a tone of moral superiority which it is difficult to conceive as coming from one friend of equal pretensions and age to another, and quite inconceivable as addressed by a simple clergyman to the bishop of the most important see in England. But perhaps there is something in the position of a schoolmaster which perverts the vision and gives to every man who opposes him something of the air of an offending schoolboy.

The mild Bishop gave to these assailants the soft answer which turneth away wrath. In the midst of all his immense labours he paused to explain his action, undiscouraged by the bitter words which even Stanley, so universally accredited with all the Christian graces, did not hesitate to pour upon him. There is no lack of firmness and steadfast adherence to his own opinion; but no one, we think, can read this correspondence without feeling that the Bishop had the best of it, any more than they will be able to suppress a movement of surprise at the tone in which his friends permit themselves to take to task a personage of such high position and a man of such liberal yet steadfast character. Naturally, while he was thus exposed to the indignation of men who resented the fact that he did not back them up, he was assailed on the other by all the missiles of a wordy warfare from those who accused him of being their secret upholder and champion. The tolerant man gets credit from neither side. Tait did his utmost to prevent any prosecution of the essayists whose works he had unhesitatingly condemned. When that prosecution came, he exerted himself strenuously as a member of the Court of Appeal for the acquittal of the accused, and succeeded. He thought the recorded disapproval of the heads of the Church a sufficient chastisement. It would be difficult to say that he was wrong in this, for persecution is the very soil of heresy; but it may be doubted whether, in a strictly human sense,