13 SEPTEMBER 1890, Page 2

The death of Canon Liddon, besides depriving the English Church

of its most famous preacher, will rob a great many Englishmen and Englishwomen of their most valued friend. There was a charm about Dr. Liddon's conversation and manner which could not be fully accounted for even by his refinement, his delicate humour, his exquisite courtesy, and his wide culture. There was a reverence in him which was not reverence for this or that man, or for this or that gift ; but which seemed to be reverence for human nature itself, whatever rude or unaccustomed forms it took, and hardly to be more marked towards the learned and the eminent than towards the poor and simple. We suspect that this was at the source of his great attractiveness, his singular winningness. Especially in a man of such keen and subtle insight, this deep reverence towards all his fellow-creatures exerted a singular charm, because it seemed to come from some deeper stratum of his nature than any of his intellectual qualities, and to be entirely independent of those qualities. There was nothing insular about Canon Liddon, and yet that which made him cosmopolitan was not so much a wide knowledge of the world as a sensitive humility which seemed to regard all the higher qualities of men as if they were above him, though in reality they were in him, and • made him sensitively appreciative of any echo of them in the world without.