back about you, and said that he hoped that the letter would soon be forgotten, but that when you next got into a similar encounter you must get your wife to write about it.' The same sympathy was felt and expressed by other Churchmen whose names will be now recognised as most weighty, such as the Bishop of Lincoln (Dr. Jackson), the Bishop of Chester (Dr. Jacobson), Dr. Macbride, the Principal of Bishop McDougall's old college, Mr. Coxe, the honoured Librarian of the Bodleian. During the whole of the controversies mentioned in this chapter he had also the warm and steady support of the officers of S.P.G., especially of the Rev. Ernest Hawkins and the Rev. W. T. Bullock, its successive secretaries, men who knew him well and could appreciate his character and motives, and whose judgment, acting under responsibility, could not but carry far more weight than that of merely sympathising and partial friends.

Notwithstanding the hubbub, it may well be doubted whether the Bishop was less esteemed than before. The people who attacked him were more noisy than influential, and it may be suspected that, with his countrymen at large, there was no diminution of his popularity. That the matter did not fall more rapidly into oblivion was due to a kind of recrudescence of the controversy, which arose upon the publication of a very unworthy and unlooked-for attack, possibly emboldened by it, which was made upon the Bishop by Mr. Spencer St. John-who had, up to 1853, been first secretary to the Rajah, and then consul in Borneo, and was afterwards knighted on his appointment as governor of a West Indian island-in a book entitled 'Life in the Forests of the Far East,' bearing the date 1862 on the title-page. It found fault with the management of the mission, with the location of its headquarters at Sarawak-although one of the original conditions held out to the subscribers to the mission fund, which was proposed for the establishment of a Church mission-house and school at that place-with the expenditure incurred, inter alia,

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upon the church and mission house (moderate as it had been), and imputed, by implication or directly, to the Bishop, every misfortune which had happened to the undertaking.

The Bishop was greatly distressed, and at the suggestion of the Rajah Mudah wrote a letter to the Society on the subject, which was published by it. The clergy of the diocese sent him an address indignantly repudiating the statements and insinuations against him. The only clergyman whose signature is wanting to the address wrote a separate letter defending the Bishop, although less indignant in its terms; but this gentleman, in addition to his missionary office, then held the temporary position of Resident representing the Sarawak Government at Lundu. The Rev. W. Hacket, chaplain at Malacca, on behalf of himself and Messrs. Chalmers and Glover-who had left while the Bishop was in England, and had obtained livings in the diocese of Melbourne, all three having, as we have seen, been clergy of the diocese of Labuan— addressed a long letter to the 'Straits Times' in defence of his late diocesan against what he termed the unscrupulous and malicious attacks of Mr. St. John.

This attack, a sad blot upon an elaborately got up, if rather tedious book, might well be neglected at this date as having been long since answered, and being now in most quarters forgotten. If anyone cares to follow it further, they may find its history in the pages of the 'Guardian' and 'Record' at the time, and in an elaborate summing up of the whole, with a crushing condemnation of the assailant, in an article in the 'Saturday Review' of January 3, 1863. Its importance did not then arise either from the book or its author, of whom it may be said that his posing as the advocate or adviser of Christian missions was simply astonishing, but from the unhappy conviction on the part of some most capable of judging that the inspiration under which it was written was that of the Rajah. So impossible did this appear to the author, that as soon as the book was brought to

R

his notice he wrote to Sir James Brooke, enclosing a letter from Mrs. McDougall, calling upon him as the proper person to refute it; and he was astonished at his refusal, dated October 3, 1862, in which he said that from the perusal of the notices of the book he was convinced that the statements were neither personal to the Bishop nor calculated to injure the mission; and at the same time he wrote both to Mrs. McDougall and to the Bishop to the same effect. Sir J. Brooke assured the Bishop on his honour that he had not seen the book until after it was published, and must therefore be believed, but he was, according to Mr. St. John, very intimate with him at the time; and when in reply an answer by the Society containing the address of the missionaries was circulated among its members, a very violent pamphlet was published in the name of Mr. St. John, which the Bishop's friends thought quite unworthy of notice but of which the reputed author, in his life of the Rajah dated 1879, astonishing as it may appear, actually affirmed that it had been written by Sir James Brooke himself.

This statement, which does not rest on the evidence of Mr. St. John alone, is inserted more in sorrow than in anger. It would willingly have been omitted if it had been possible, and so much only is retained as appears necessary for the vindication of the Bishop and his work. To the day of his death, Bishop McDougall bore no malice against the Rajah. He imputed his conduct to ill advice working upon a mind weakened for the time. Sir J. Brooke had come back from Borneo sorely shaken in health, and since his return had suffered from paralysis. He was a disappointed man, angry with the Government of his country, and quarrelling with some of his best friends on a subject upon which they could not agree with him, but with which Bishop McDougall had nothing to do, and the latter believed him to be acting under a misconception, which would account for his feelings, although it would not justify conduct that was not straightforward.

It is often hard to say what may have been the cause of

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a disagreement, but it may be inferred from the whole history that the Rajah's jealousy had been excited by the appointment of the Bishop to a colonial bishopric, which he had, in two letters still remaining, vehemently urged him to decline, desiring that he should be Bishop of Sarawak alone; by the accidents of the Chinese insurrection, and upon the unhappy quarrel between himself and his nephew Captain Brooke, and by the Bishop's friendship with the latter. With such latent grievances, there may have been those who sought to make mischief between them, or did so involuntarily. But that there should have been any jealousy is surprising, for the Rajah had all the power in his own hands, and the Bishop had always been studiously careful of his honour, as must have been observed on the perusal of his letter to the Society on the occasion of the Chinese insurrection. In the quarrel between uncle and nephew the Bishop's desire was to be the friend of both, and to allay the dissension. Each wished to enlist him as a partisan, which he refused to be, and each represented the other as guilty of complicity in the attack upon him, but there is no direct evidence in the author's possession of any open breach. Many letters remain written by the Rajah to the Bishop or Mrs. McDougall. They are couched in playful, genial, and affectionate terms, none more warmly expressed than those written after the Chinese insurrection, when they were detained at Linga.

The quarrel between uncle and nephew does not belong, except incidentally, to our story. It had a secret history. which will not here be related, but it can scarcely be controverted but that in the differences which have been made public there were faults on both sides. Sir James Brooke had made his nephew Rajah Mudah, associating him with himself in the Raj, and had repeatedly pledged himself that he should be his heir; he had even done so in writing to Mr. Grant of Kilgraston, before the marriage of his daughter with Captain Brooke, and thenceforth he had no right to offer the

country to England, France, Belgium, or Holland without the consent of his nephew, who had, moreover, made many sacrifices and suffered much for Sarawak. On the other hand, when the Rajah left Borneo in 1861, scarcely expecting to return, although he had accepted a testimonial from his friends of about 8,800/. on the ground of the retirement enforced by his health, he had never resigned his rights as Rajah, and his acceptance of this fund, which was not provided by Captain Brooke, did not entitle the latter to insist that it was an abdication; nor could he be considered to have pledged himself for all future time not to act as he thought best for the interest of Sarawak, which was not so much the exercise of a right as the performance of a duty. It would have been much better and more becoming if the Rajah Mudah had been contented to suffer what he considered wrong with patience, rather than have defied his uncle, who was far more powerful than he was; but in his self-assertion he neither sought nor followed the counsel of the Bishop, who disapproved his conduct. The Rajah's answer to his nephew was his own instant return to the East. They met at Singapore, and the result of this interview was the final return to England of Captain Brooke.

He died in 1868, broken-hearted and paralysed, and with a clouded mind. It is no duty on the part of the author to vindicate his memory further than to express his belief that he was both an unfortunate and in intention an honourable The statement of his case, fairly not exhaustively set out, will be found in Mr. Helms's book already mentioned.

man.

When the Rajah left Borneo finally for England at the end of 1863, he wrote to the Bishop from Singapore, telling him that he hoped that the recognition of the State by England 'would now be gained, which would be a happy day for Sarawak and for us all.' He mentioned that a copy of Captain Brooke's pamphlet, in which he vindicated his conduct and set forth his grievances, would be handed to the