that he would have been an excellent layman. He hesitated, and took advice. Church, Liddon, and the present Dean of St. Paul's all counselled acceptance. If biographies tell the truth, about which there can in this case be no sort of doubt, such is the invariable consequence of consulting clerical friends. Nor could any one deny that Dr. Stubbs would increase the reputation of the episcopal Bench, where none of his colleagues, save Dr. Lightfoot, then Bishop of Durham, could compare with him in learning. Lightfoot, however, was a practical man; and if he had remained at Cambridge, he would not in all probability have written a standard book. Dr. Creighton, who afterwards deserted history for episcopacy, became an excellent bishop. He delighted to exercise his great mental powers in work which bore immediate fruit; and he was naturally fitted to deal with men. To Stubbs, nine-tenths of his new duties seemed sheer waste of time. His heart and mind were in his books. Earnestly pious and devout, generous almost to a fault with money, the Bishop of Chester grudged all outlay which was not charitable, and every hour spent in "that worst form of trifling called business." A theologian, Mr. Hutton tells us, said that he had a "sceptical mind," meaning, no doubt, that he declined to accept historical conclusion without historical evidence, He certainly believed in apostolical succession. But he did not believe in diocesan conferences; and he was incapable of concealing his want of belief. He took refuge in that incorrigible humor which was rather stimulated than quenched by the episcopal office. It is indeed melancholy to reflect that, before his experience of Mr. Gladstone's cruel kindness, he had proposed to write a Constitutional History of the Reformation, which all the other bishops on the Bench could not have compiled among them.

The Bishop of Chester was said, by one who knew him well, never to have changed an opinion. His tastes and habits were not more flexible. Though a High Churchman by conviction, regarding Erastianism as anathema, he detested elaborate ritual, and was not even fond of hymns. Asked on one occasion if he thought them appropriate, he answered with a quotation from the last of them: "Oh, dear me, yes, to be sure."

"Yet saints their watch are keeping, Their cry goes up: How long?" Bishops, and even mere clergymen, can say with impunity what in laymen would be thought profane. Yet some of Dr. Stubbs's more solemn incumbents thought they sometimes detected in him a slight inclination to flippancy. If he had been without it, he would have died of a plethora of "functions." "Life," he wrote to Freeman from Chester, "is as much a burden here as it is everywhere else: the advantage of being a bishop is that one has no time to think about it." He had to spend a large part of his time in trains; and could only "get an hour now and then for William of Malmesbury." His humor was his salvation. "What a great many people there are in the world," he wrote on his return from Italy, "to whom the disestablishment of the English Church will make no difference." Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, he could not see what difference a great many things made which bishops were supposed to regard as very serious indeed. He emphatically declined to be "organized" himself; and had not the slightest wish to organize other people. He wanted to be let alone, to pray without fuss, and to study in peace. He had always been a great novel-reader; and he now read more novels than ever. Putting him at Chester was like putting him on the rack. But there was worse torture to follow.

Lord Melbourne used to say that the bishops died to spite him. They resigned to spite Stubbs. The resignation of Dr. Jacobson was the first stroke. The resignation of Dr. Mackarness was the final blow. A retiring bishop, it may be explained, takes away a third of the income, and leaves all the work. Stubbs had found himself a poorer man at Chester than he was at St. Paul's. Just as Jacobson's death had improved his pecuniary position, he was offered another see burdened with another pension. Lord Salisbury, like Mr. Gladstone, was a well-meaning man. He thought, not unnaturally, that Oxford was entitled to the most learned bishop on the Bench; and Dr. Stubbs thought that he could not refuse heavier work. So he accepted, and then he suffered acute misery. The Bishop of Oxford does not live in the city, but in a country house called Cuddesdon, remote from railways, with gardeners, and coachmen, and all the rest of it. To this plain and homely scholar, life in such a place was repugnant. There was, in his opinion, only one thing to be done with Cuddesdon; and that was to sell it. But to this the Ecclesiastical Commissioners would by no means give their consent; and Archbishop Benson, in a letter of remarkable shrewdness, remarked that "the Bishop of Oxford is not wanted in that Cathedral. It would be impolitic and not for the good of the University that he should eclipse the Dean in affairs, and worse more widely that the Dean should eclipse him." The idea of any one eclipsing the magnificent potentate who was at that time Dean of Christchurch is hardly conceivable. But, Chancellor of the Garter as he was, it is possible that Dr. Stubbs might have been eclipsed by Dr. Liddell. At any rate, as a man who makes his bed must lie on it, he had to live at Cuddesdon. He became restless, impatient, hurried, disgusted

with trivial engagements, apprehensive of interruptions. The parsons of his agricultural diocese were oppressed by poverty; and he had three glass houses, which he would not even look at. He would have given all the glass houses in the world for the chance of reading at the Bodleian. Occasionally, he stayed in the Lollard's Tower at Lambeth, as when he attended Mr. George Smith's Dictionary Dinner, and walked home. "I was quite well, thank you," he said, to Mr. Sidney Lee the next morning, "but my boots were tight." Many good things were said at the dinner, but nothing better, or at least funnier, than that.

The plain truth is, that this great student and sagacious historian was, as Bishop of Oxford, bored to death. Without the safety-valve of his humor, there would have been some terrific explosions; and even Mr. Hutton would have had to admit that his hero could despise the office of a bishop. As it was, he sailed uncommonly near the wind when an unkind fate put him on the Archbishop's Court at Lambeth, to try the Bishop of Lincoln for wearing vestments in a parish church. On that occasion, at all events, Stubbs had no business to be there. He did not believe that the Bishop of Lincoln ought to be tried. He did not believe that the Archbishop of Canterbury had any jurisdiction to try him. He did not think that the lawyers knew what they were talking about. He regarded it all as a sham and a solemn farce; and he did not hesitate to say so. "It is not a Court," he kept saying; "it is an archbishop sitting in his library." The whole case should be left to a jury of matrons, whom he named. "How does his Grace get his patience? Is it from the Stores? I sit and admire him and then sleep it off." His Grace was in his element, thoroughly enjoying himself, and required no commiseration.

The use of crossing next appears
Too hard for our digestion;
The question of the cross remains
A very crucial question.

Now it was verse, then it was prose.

Oh, the wearing weariness of it all! Once the earth was without form and void; now it is full of forms, and has not ceased to be void. . . . Certainly this Court is quite informal and the subject void of all interest. One feels inclined to deal with forms without any ceremony, and with ceremonies without much formality.

Such quaint cries of despair never went up before, either from a bishop, or from a judge, or even from an assessor. A good man gone wrong Bishop Stubbs could hardly be called. A great man out of place he certainly was. The thing of which he had the greatest horror was wasting time; and nobody wastes more time than a modern bishop. His last duty, which it did not require a bishop to perform, was at once congenial and heroic. The death of Queen Victoria, in January, 1901, found him depressed in spirits, and enfeebled by illness. He had always felt a reverent admiration for the Queen; and, in spite of medical warnings, he obeyed the King's command to preach at St. George's, Windsor, the day after the funeral, which he also attended. His simple, manly, straightforward sermon is compared, with curious infelicity, by Mr. Hutton, to the splendid and highly artificial orations of Bossuet, Massillon, and Bourdaloue. It was a characteristic utterance from the Bishop's heart, and therefore as unlike the "French preachers of the great age" as anything could well be. It was his last public effort. On the 22nd of April he died, in his seventy-seventh year, three months after his friend and brother historian, Mandell Creighton, who was almost twenty years his junior.

Both to the lay and to the ecclesiastical mind it must seem that Professor Stubbs's acceptance of a bishopric was the mistake of his life. That he was a great bishop, only flattery will assert. That he was a great, though not a popular, historian, is the unanimous opinion of the few who are competent to judge him. Nine-tenths of his episcopal work was mechanical and secular. His History always upholds the cause of the Church, whose loyal and faithful minister he would always, in any circumstances, have been. What the Church and the world have lost by his "hallowing," as Freeman called it, we shall never know; but we may guess. No man of equal learning has treated the English Reformation from his peculiar platform. We can find Protestantism and eloquence in Froude, Catholicism and accuracy in Lingard. But Stubbs was a sturdy Anglican, whose sympathies were neither with Ridley, nor with Gardiner, but with Laud. Although he would never have perverted evidence or falsified a fact. he would have told the story better than any one else could tell it, as an Englishman and an ecclesiastic. That the Bishop of Rome neither hath nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this realm of England, Stubbs held as strongly as Froude. He adhered with equal firmness to the doctrine, that the Church of England had never lost its identity since Britain was converted to the Christian faith. He was not, like Gibbon, a citizen of the world, with an impartial contempt for everything except historical truth. He was, like Macaulay, an intensely patriotic Englishman, and as much a Tory as Macaulay was a Whig. His Liberal friends, such as Freeman and Green, never made the smallest impression on him. While he admired Gladstone's Churchmanship, he abhorred his politics. I do not myself believe in absolutely impartial history. What we

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want is both sides. There is no book in the English language to supply the place of that which Stubbs would have written on the Reformation. Creighton's admirable and delightful History of the Papacy is, in setting, Italian, not English; and no one would guess that it was written by a clergyman. Stubbs would have given the clerical and Conservative view of Henry the Eighth's legislation, upon which the whole controversy really turns. He would have done much more. would have drawn an indelible picture of a great constitutional struggle, a struggle for first principles, between Church and King. He might have gone on to depict the rise of Puritanism, the temperate or temporizing policy of Elizabeth, the change of Tudors for Stuarts, the great catastrophe that followed. He would not have settled questions which will be debated and disputed till the end of time. But he would have written a book which no one who took part in them could ever neglect, which would have remained the classical statement of a Tory Churchman's historic creed. Disr. aliter visum, he said, when he did not get the Deanery of Ripon. When he did get the Bishopric of Oxford, he said that he had committed suicide. If historicide be a crime, he was a criminal. "In they broke, those people of importance," Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, and slew, not a life, but an immortality. But he was himself particeps criminis.

In a quiet deanery, Dr. Stubbs would have had all the clerical opportunities he desired, and could have done work which would never have died. What he did as a bishop, hundreds could have done as well, and scores could have done better. His successor in the See of Oxford has contributed to this volume just three pages, which have, no doubt, an esoteric meaning for clergymen, but, to my lay mind, mean noth

ing at all. Every page written by Stubbs himself is full of significance, and often suggests far more than it says. That he was an honor to his order, is of course true. But at this moment there is hardly an English bishop known outside his diocese except the Archbishop of Canterbury, who travels, and the Bishop of Hereford, who represents the people in the House of Lords. Yet they are all excellent men; pious, efficient, and industrious, with no sense of divided allegiance to neglected studies. In the House of Lords Bishop Stubbs did not count. What did his dioceses, apart from the University, care for his erudition? As much as a public meeting cares for a Senior Wrangler. Creighton had great gifts for administration, for speaking, for managing men. Stubbs had none. He was the best joker on the Bench, and the most persistent grumbler. Humanly speaking, he was bored with his life. History never bored him, never tired him, never exhausted his keenness, his sagacity, his patience, his love of truth, his faith in the providential government of the world. A late Prime Minister used to say that the clergy might be exhaustively divided into two classes. The first consisted of those who wanted to be bishops, and were unfit to be. The second comprised those who were fit to be bishops, and did not want to be. Stubbs belonged to neither class. Although he thought for some time that his Party neglected him, he was free from ambition. He was a victim to a sense of duty, and to a belief that episcopal functions were religious in some sense in which history is not. The awful line of the great Epicurean poet ascribes to religion the sacrifice of an innocent girl. The religion of which Lucretius speaks was Pagan, as Mr. Pecksniff said, with regret, of the Sirens. That must surely be a narrow view of historical research which ex