BOOKS•

THE DEAN ON THE DEAN.* Tins is a very graceful and charming picture of one of the most -graceful and charming of men. It is difficult to read anything about the late Dean of Westminster without being reminded in -every page of Carlyle's somewhat artificial, but still, as his wont was, singularly vivid picture of the peculiar radiance of the nature of John Sterling. " Rapidity as of pulsing auroras, as of dancing lightnings, rapidity in all forms characterised him."

A man of infinite susceptivity, who caught everywhere, more than others, the colour of the element he lived in, the infection of all that was or appeared honourable, beautiful, and manful an the tendencies of his time." " Here visible to myself for somewhile, was a brilliant human presence, distinguishable, honourable, and loveable, amid the dim common populations, -among the million little beautiful, once more a beautiful human -soul, whom I among others recognised and lovingly walked with, while the years and the hours were." The whole descrip- tion Carlyle gives of Sterling has always seemed to the present writer to apply with much more force to Arthur Penrhyn Stanley,

• Recollections of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, late Dean of Westminster. Three Lectures, delivered in Edinburgh in November, 18S2. By George Granville Bradley, D.D., Dean of Westminster. London: John Murray.

to whom, indeed, it was given, as it has been given to few others of this generation, to produce the impression of moral beauty, of "sheet-lightning," of "pulsing anroras," as Carlyle, in his vivid image, calls it, on the many friends of whose lives he

formed one of the brightest ornaments. And this is pre- cisely the impression which Dean Bradley's terse and graphic little book produces ; while Carlyle's never really pro- duced that impression on our mind concerning Sterling, partly because Sterling's own letters hardly bear out Carlyle's description, while they produce a decidedly stronger impression in some directions than Carlyle chose to receive,—partly because Carlyle himself in speaking of Sterling, sometimes strikes an inconsistent note with the main tenor of his descrip- tion, as when he says, for instance, " At times he could crackle with his dexterous petulancies, making the air all like needles round you," which is not at all in the same plane with the main delineation. Anyhow, Dean Bradley's actual picture of his predecessor seems to us to sum itself up much more truly in Carlyle's general portrait of the swift, sunny, and radiant nature which he attributed to John Sterling, than the drift of Sterling's own life does. In almost every page of Dean Bradley's charm- ing little book some one or more of Carlyle's characterising epithets for Sterling came back upon the mind of the present reviewer.

Let us give, first, Dean Bradley's account of Stanley's re- ception of himself, as a scholar of University College, forty- one years before he was called upon to succeed him as Dean of Westminster :—

" May I be allowed to insert here what is to myself something more than a slight personal reminiscence P It was after his migra- tion from Balliol, that it became the duty of the new Fellow of University, early in the year 1840, to take part in the annual Scholarship Examination, which ended in the election of a Rugby schoolboy, the first of many whom his rising fame drew not from Rugby only, to a College which had so wisely added to its teaching staff so attractive and magnetic an influence. More than two.and- forty years have passed since, on that bright March afternoon, the loud congratulations of old friends and schoolfellows were hashed for a moment as the young Examiner stepped into the quadrangle and turned to greet the new scholar. How well does he recall that kindly greeting—the hearty grasp of the friendly hand that seemed to carry the heart in it—the bright, expressive countenance of the young tutor, so fall of all that might win and charm a somewhat imaginative schoolboy, which shines still out of the distance in all its first youthful beauty as the face of an angel.' He at once invited the newly-elected scholar to take a walk with him on his return from a formal visit to the Master of the College, and that dull road that led out by the then unplanted, unreolaimed, Oxford Parks, is still lit, in the memory of him who trod it by his side, with something fairer than the bright March sun which shone across it. We are walking,' he said, towards Rugby,' and at once placed his companion at his ease by questions about his friends there, and about the Master who was the object of as enthusiastic a devotion to the younger as to the older Rugbeian. How little did it occur to either, as they parted, how strangely near their lives were to be drawn to each other ! The younger might have listened to a soothsayer who had said,' You have won to-day something that you will soon count far more precious than the scholarship in which you are exulting; but how con- temptuously would he have turned from the prediction that he would years after be called from the headship of the College of which he was that day enrolled as the youngest member, to succeed, in his new friend, not the least illustrious and the most lamented of the Deans of Westminster. It is in virtue of the friendship of which that day was the birthday that I have stood before you this evening."

One of the most charming and fascinating of Dean Stanley's characteristics was, as Mr. Disraeli aptly termed it, his " pictur- esque sensibility." But in many men, picturesque sensibility, far from being a brightening and enlivening, proves to be rather a relaxing and depressing quality. Unless accompanied with animation, good-sense, an eye fixed on the object, and a judgment using subjective feelings only to make the object clearer, pic- turesque sensibility is often a most wearisome and oppressive kind of faculty, which fills the air with morbid elements. This was never so with Dean Stanley, because his "picturesque sensibility" was, as Dean Bradley shows us, altogether historic in its turn, because it was always lighting up some interesting external scene with its insight,—and nothing really adds more to the charm of social intercourse than that How happy is Stanley's first remark on his father's Palace at Norwich, just after Dr. Stanley had succeeded to the Bishopric I-

" In the same letter, addressed to his brother on board H.M.S. Terror,' he gives a characteristic account of their new home, con- trasting the ugliness of the Palace with the surpassing beauty of the Cathedral that overshadows it. The former ia,' says the yet nu- travelled traveller, among houses what Moscow is, I should think, among cities. Rooms which one may really call very fine, side by side with the meanest of passages and staircases. By the river-side:

he characteristically writes, is a ruin where a Bishop once killed a wolf ; over the river, a road down which another Bishop marched with 6,000 men at arms.' "

And here is Dean Bradley's most terse and admirable comment on Stanley's powers of description :—

" Scenery in and for itself, the aspects of Nature as viewed in their own light and for their own sake, he never, I think I am right in say- ing, never once attempts to describe. In one of his letters to an old pupil, written at Canterbury in 1854, there is a passage which gives the key alike to the excellencies and the deficiencies of this great painter of Nature. I cannot think,' he says, that mere effusions of emotion at the transient blushes of Nature deserve an everlasting record. I feel about such effusions, almost as I feel about my present, oftentimes ineffectual, labours at reproducing scenes of my travels' (he was then at work at ' Sinai and Palestine that they are not worth publishing, except as a framework to events or ideas of greater magnitude.' Of Nature, as studied for her own sake, in the spirit of Wordsworth, or of so many true poets in all ages, or of Mr. Raskin among modern prose writers, there will be found, I venture to say, no trace in his published writings or in his letters since he grew to manhood. Whenever he becomes enthusiastic on the beauties of nature, we may feel sure that there is always at work a motive other than that of the artist—that behind nature lies some human or his. torical interest. How mysterious,' he says, in a letter to a younger friend, then at Rome, 'the Alban lake! How beautiful Nemi ! how romantic Subiaco ; how solemn Ostia! how desolate Gabii!' What could be better ? you will say. Yes; but behind all these, there lay on his mental retina the background of the history of Rome= the one only place,' he goes on to say, in the whole world, that is absolutely inexhaustible ! ' It is quite true that, occasionally, in some three, or four, or five remarkable passages, occurring especially, and for an obvious reason, in his American addresses, he introduces pictures of some natural phenomena, quite apart from any direct historical association. Such is the splendid picture of the Falls of Niagara ; the graceful and touching image, a tree sonnet in prose, drawn from two trees, the graceful maple and the gnarled and twisted oak, growing aide by side; the description of the course of the St. Lawrence as contrasted with that of the Nile ; of sunrise, as seen from the summit of the Righi. But in each of these apparent exceptions to his ordinary habit, he seizes on some aspect of ex- ternal nature, not for its own sake, but as the symbol of some idea— some truth, that he wishes to enforce or interpret. As a general rule, he looks on nature not as a poetical interpreter of nature—not, we may fairly say, as a poet in the truest sense—but as one who seems never to feel that he has thoroughly mastered any event, or chain of events, in human or sacred history, till he has seen the spot and breathed the air which give to each occurrence its peculiar and local colouring. And with what an eye he sees!—with what a power of insight and discrimination he reproduces the exact points in which nature and history meet and blend with, and mutually influence, each other ! We go,' he said in his Sermons in the East, 'to the Jeru- salem where Christ died and rose again. To see that Holy City, even though the exact spots of His death and resurrection are unknown, is to give a stew force to the sound of the name, whenever afterwards we hear it in Church, or read it in the Bible.' The words apply in their first sense to the most sacred of all lands and of all scenes. But the feeling that dictated them is the key to something else, to the unwearied, the insatiable avidity—I can call it nothing less—with which he would fatigue the most indefatigable of fellow travellers or hosts, by visiting any and every spot, however apparently insignifi- cant, which was connected, directly or indirectly, with any historical event or person, or with any scene in the works of the great masters of poetry or fiction, or even with any important legend that had ever influenced the human mind. At Lindisfarne,' says one who visited it with him, his mind was, I am sure, quite as mach occupied with the immurement of Constance, as with the memory of St. Aidan and St. Cuthbert.' Tours was to him quite as much associated with Quentin Durward as with St. Martin, or with Hildegarde, or Louis XI., or Henry II. His persistence in dragging a fellow-traveller to call on the Archbishop of Granada was based quite as much on his being the lineal successor of the master of Gil Blas, as on his being the occupant of that historic see. And the keen eye for detecting resemblances and points of agreement under superficial or real differences, that gave such a character to his whole treatment of history and of theology, followed him also in his visits to historic places. As he saw an analogy to the yet unvisited Moscow in his new home in Norwich, so he delighted to point out the seven hills of Rome in the same city."

The tenderness and ardour of Stanley's friendships are also most powerfully presented by his friend and successor. We must find room for one more extract, because it shows that the brilliancy of Stanley's feelings must have added yet more to the significance of his friendships, than it added even to the vivacity of his social intercourse :—

" At the conclusion of his tour in Greece, he wrote the letter to Dr. Arnold to which I have already referred, in solitude, or worse than solitude. His fellow-sufferers under the miseries of a Maltese quarantine were some young men, whose loose talk revolted him, and who had not the good-sense to discover that beneath the mask of that averted countenance and those silent lips, was one, to enjoy whose society and conversation many wiser than themselves would have gladly faced the horrors of that tedious imprisonment. Released at last, he arrived alone at Naples, depressed, home-sick, and yearning for some congenial society. In the Museum he met an English acquaintance, who said, ' Of course, you have seen Hugh Pearson ?' mentioning the name of one of his closest Balliol friends. ' Hugh Pearson P he exclaimed ; where is he i' and darted in search of him. He found him in front of a well-known statue, rushed up to him, and, overcome with joy and emotion, fell into his friend's arms with a burst of uncontrollable tears. I mention the incident, not merely as illustrative of his tender and affectionate nature, which never lost a spark of its youthful warmth till the hand relaxed its olasp, and the heart bad ceased to beat, but because the companion whom he then found, and with whom he completed his homeward journey, became from that time the very closest and most inseparable of all his friends. When sorrowing mourners gathered in April last round the grave of that friend, from whom death had severed him for a time, there was one feeling in many hearts—that they had lost one who, beyond any living person, was in full possession of the whole soul of him to whom death had reunited him—that the most trustworthy, the most in- timate, the most continuous of the authorities for the history of Arthur Stanley, had passed into the world beyond the grave, in the- person of his friend, Hugh Pearson."

Dean Bradley's Recollections are recollections only, and contain no criticism. We may add that the only criticism which is in any way appropriate to the book is this,—that Stanley's ardour for breadth and comprehensiveness, tending as it did to rest on a purely historic basis, and to justify almost every development which could naturally link itself with the past, necessarily became less an ardour for truth than an ardour for charity, and that in his hands the Christian religion becomes almost purely a re- ligion of love, while its intellectual outlines on every side seem to- fade away. That is the defect, so far as there is a defect, in Stanley's mind, a defect visible throughout. He helps you to understand everything which needs chiefly new local and historic colour for its interpretation, but does not help you to see what there is which is permanent beneath the constant fluctua- tions and changes of local and historic colour; so that his writings tend. rather to produce on the mind the false im- pression that truth itself changes from age to age, just as the- hum an capacity to understand it certainly does change. That is the take-off from the great moral beauty of the picture here-

presented to ns by Stanley's warm friend and wise successor.