6 DECEMBER 1873, Page 3

A meeting was held at Willis's Rooms on Tuesday afternoon

to raise a fund for a memorial to Bishop Wilberforce. It was addressed by Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Gathorne Hardy, in terms of what seems to us extremely one-sided and exaggerated panegyric. We sincerely think that there is an unreality in the conventional English tone about deceased public men for which we know no remedy but the practice, which Rome always insists upon in examining into questions of saintship, of having an advocates diaboli, who shall state the case against the candidate for beatitude. Something of the kind might well be done, and done without any offence against taste, when Englishmen meet to extol their departed countrymen. Every one who knew anything of Bishop Wilberforce's public career will admit that he was a man of singularly wide sympathies, great tenderness of nature, wonderful talents for debate, vast industry, and after a fashion, sincere piety. But for our own parts, we can say, after reading a considerable number of his religious writings, and very many indeed of his religious speeches, that to our minds no less real, no more conventional religious speaker and writer of equal abilities is known to us. We never heard or read a religious production of his which we should care to read again, and we have read a good many which seemed to us so artificially unctuous, so utterly destitute of any sign of genuine moral and intellectual freshness, as to be

positively unhealthy. Let there be a monument to him, by all means, but let there be some protest at least against Mr. Gladstone's astounding panegyric on him as a Universal Bishop, whose name must ever stand high "among the whole array of diocesan Bishops, not of this country only, but of the whole Christian world, and not of this generation only, but of the generations which preceded it." What more could be said, if he had been an Augustine, or at least a Butler?