DEAN WICICHAlkt* TN this unpretentious and very readable memoir the
author tells us that his personal acquaintance with the late Dean was restricted to the Lincoln days, the last period in a varied and active life. But he has been fortunate in the assistance he
has received from colleagues, contemporaries, and pupils of Edward Wickham, and those who knew him more intimately than was nossible for Prebendary Ragg will admit that the portrait, if somewhat idealized, is a faithful and sym- pathetic study of one to whose finer qualities justice was not always rendered in his lifetime. It was Wickbam's misfortune that the twenty years during which, as bead master of Wellington, he was most conspicuously before the public eye formed the least successful epoch in his career.
Events move so rapidly at Oxford that his great reputation there during the 'sixties has long been forgotten outside the walls of New College. And the valuable work which be did in Lincoln Cathedral, in Convocation, and on the Education Settlement Committee was not of the class which brings fame or popularity. Moreover in private life his habitual reserve and a. coldness of manner, more apparent than real, made him a person difficult to approach and appreciate. ' His temperament," writes the Archbishop of Canterbury in his foreword to this volume, was not, perhaps, of the sort which readily evokes the enthusiasm of the ordinary observer, but I am certain that in the general life of the Church he was in his later years drawing to himself in rapidly increasing volume the confidence of all sorts and con- ditions of men. He was, as it seems to me, one of the rare men whose gift it has been to combine with a steady, definite, and con- sistent Churehmanship that wider outlook upon men and things which belongs often—though I suppose not exclusively—to the cultured Liberalism, both political and other, of which he was an eager and even an uncompromising exponent."
From his close connexion with Mr. Gladstone, whose eldest daughter he married shortly after his appointment to Wellington, Wickham was brought into the inner circle of Liberal politics, and he was a stronger party man than might be gathered from the pages of this biography. Though schooled in the traditions of Academic Liberalism as under- stood at Oxford fifty years ago, he followed his great father- in-law undismayed through the kaleidoscopic adventures which lost him so many of his most faithful adherents ; and the fiery hatred of wrong-doing, of injustice and oppression, which was one of Wickham's strongest characteristics, made Lim peculiarly susceptible to Gladstonian influence.
The son of an old Wykehamist Master, and himself entitled, though he never claimed them, to the privileges of Founders' kin, Edward Wickham was naturally educated at Winchester and New College. Though he failed, partly through the prejudice of one of the examiners, to obtain a first in Literati Humaniores, he carried off the Latin Verse and the Latin Essay, and acquired a reputation for exquisite scholar- ship which never left him ; his lectures to the Honours men reading for Classical Moderations were unsurpassed in the University, and though he is best known as the editor and translator of Horace, he was equally at home with the Greek historians and tragedians. New College was just passing through the throes of a new birth when he was first appointed Tutor, and he took the leading part in those wise and well- considered measures which rescued it from its humiliating position as a close and undistinguished preserve of Win- chester. It was owing to him, jointly with Edwin Palmer of Balliol, that the first beginnings were made of the now universal system of inter-collegiate lectures; and the most fruitful recommendations of the University Com- mission of 1877 embody the policy which he never ceased to advocate and support. Wise, cautions, and conciliatory, he supplied qualities in which some of the reform leaders were sadly deficient, and his removal from Oxford was a loss to the University quite as much as to his own college. Here, whether in the lecture-room, in chapel, or in the intimacy of Long Vacation reading parties, he built up an influence over his pupils, and in scarcely less degree over the members of the senior common room, which only death was able to sever. Wickham was born for Oxford, and one of the chief seats in the academic hierarchy would certainly have been his bad he remained there. But the temptation to succeed
• A Memoir of Eduard Charles Wickham, Dean of Lincoln, formerly Head Xa der Wellington College. By Lansdale Ragg, 13.D., with a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury. London: Edward Arnold. [7s. 6d. net.] Dr. Benson at Wellington College proved irresistible. On the face of it there seemed no reason why he should not be as successful in the role of a head master as in that of a college tutor; but the dream was doomed to disappointment, as will be apparent to those who can read between the lines of the Wellington College chapter in this book. For one thing he was never really at home in his environment. Though a reformer by nature, be had been brought up in an atmosphere of well- ordered tradition, where the foundations were deep, the walls firm, the roof water-tight. He was unprepared for the incom- plete and makeshift fabric which bad been reared and kept in its place by the fertile brain and restless activity of his predecessor. There were momenta in his first years, before certain necessary changes had been effected, when the whole structure threatened to collapse, and it was thanks largely to the strong group of assistant masters whom Benson bad gathered round him that the storm was weathered. Yet Wickham possessed many of the qualifications of a great head master. He understood boy nature, as his sermons show; be was most considerate and kind to those brought in close contact with him, he was a broad-minded teacher, and his masters and prefects came to know that be was much better acquainted with what was going on around him than they bad imagined. But he lacked the "driving power" which was necessary to maintain the school in the state to which it had been brought, as well as the force and magnetism which alone can impress boys in the mass. When be resigned in 1893 the school had begun to show signs of decay, both in numbers and prestige, and he would gladly have gone earlier had not a series of outbreaks of illness, aggravated by spiteful attacks in the Press, made him cling to his poet till the worst was over. In the following year he was made Dean of Lincoln by his father-in-law, and Prebendary Ragg is at his best in his description of the quiet days which heralded the end. In his cathedral, as in the chapels of New College and Wellington, and in the University Church, Wickham showed himself a most thoughtful and effective preacher. He took an active part in all diocesan business. He made his mark in Convo- cation as a debater and a moderate and sagacious counsellor. In the struggle over the various Education Bills of the last decade he was a strong champion of the solution which has been persistently advocated in these columns. He died in August, 1910, when abroad with his family in Switzerland. His death made a gap in the ranks of Liberal Churchmen which will never be quite filled, and he will always be remem- bered as one of the finest types of Oxford scholarship, both in the technical and the widest sense of the word.
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