LIFE OF BISHOP PERCIVAL.* PERCIVAL has long since been added

to the list of the great Head Masters of English public schools. He was the maker of Clifton. He was not less successful when he became Head Master of Rugby, and had to pull the school round after it had suffered from a certain period of slackness and loss of esteem. Finally, as Bishop of Hereford, he showed that he could also be a great ecclesiastic. He fought with wonderful persistency and courage for the principle of comprehension in the Church of England.

Dr. William Temple, the present Bishop of Manchester, by a particularly skilful joining together of letters and written appreciations, has told Percival's life partly in the language of Percival himself and partly in that of his nearest friends. The

biographer seldom obtrudes an explicit opinion of his own, but when he does so he does it with singular effect, for it is always an obviously just emphasis upon the impression already produced. For all his admiration and affection for Percival—

having been under him at Rugby he knew him as a boy knows his master—the biographer thinks that Percival's real fault was an absence of sympathy with his opponents. Percival never succeeded in getting—perhaps never tried to get—inside the minds of those who disagreed with him. If we explored the subject far enough, however, we should probably have to come to the conclusion that this was an inevitable defect of Percival's qualities. If he had accepted the reasonableness of two points of view he would never have managed great schools and a diocese with the positiveness and directness and confidence which were always characteristic of him—not unless he had been a man in ten million instead of a man in a million.

Percival was the son of a Westmorland " statesman," that is to say a yeoman farmer, who was a typical dalesman. He was educated at Appleby till he went with a scholarship to Queen's College, Oxford. His speech all his life retained traces of his northern birth and his bringing-up among farmers. It is curious how the northern accent and its appropriateness to his individuality are remembered by a large proportion of those who were under Percival and who speak or write about him.

On going down from Oxford he was ordained and joined the staff at Rugby in September, IRO. Temple, afterwards Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, and the father of Percival's biographer, was then the Head Master. During his short experience at Rugby Percival learned for what qualities assistant masters should be chosen, and what should and could be expected of them. At the early age of twenty-eight he was invited to become Head Master of Clifton, which opened in September, 1862, with sixty boys. The staff had to be built up from the beginning. Percival cared comparatively little far technical qualities, but he had an unerring eye for personalityand character. His staff at Clifton was one of the most brilliant ever gathered together. If he wanted a particular man he virtually impressed him. The late Dean of Winchester used to describe the method. Mr. Furneaux, as he then was, was at Oxford. One day he heard a knock at his door, and the visitor announced himself with the words : " I am Percival, of Clifton. Can I speak to you ? " Mr. Furneaux asked him to sit down in the room where a pupil was being coached. Percival, however, preferred to remain outside and sat on the stairs. A few minutes later, when the pupil was dismissed, Percival came in and said: " I want you to come and be my Sixth Form Master at Clifton. I have been speaking to your old Head Master, Bradley, about you, and he told me to come and sit here till you agreed. That's what I mean to do." Dakyns; Oakeley and T. E. Brown, among Percival's assistants, became names to conjure with at Clifton. Such loyalty as they displayed can seldom if ever have been exceeded.

Sir Herbert Warren, the President of Magdalen, has contributed his impression of Percival's personality. He was conscious at first only of Percival's austerity, but quite a different realization of his character followed :—

" d I sometimes think you'd " condawn " any crime,' he once said in a somewhat similar mood to the upper bench when some- thing had gone wrong, which we did not realize it was our pro- vince to prevent. Yet gradually, I can honestly say for myself, and I think for our generation, we came by and by not only to respect and admire but more and more to love him. Praise seldom ' was his practice, but when it came the praise was additionally sweet. When he warmed into affection it was like • Life of Bishop Percival. By William Temple, Bishop of Manchester London: Macmillan. (18s. net.1

the sudden glow of sunshine on one of the rocky peaks of his native countryside."

Percival's character has also been described in Sir Henry Newbolt's school story The Twymans. That story tells of the

tall, spare figure, the chiselled face with its lofty and remote air, the slightly stooping head and the unconsciously melancholy cadence of the voice. Percival, if not eloquent in words, was eloquent in himself. He was never subjective. He always spoke ,directly and objectively. Those who read his sermons afterwards could hardly understand the penetrating effect the words had when they were delivered.

Percival was the first to introduce Natural Science into the curriculum of a public school. In order to observe a just balance between athletic and intellectual interests, he made a rule that

the Head Prefect must also be captain of the football. The boys were shocked. The plan worked well enough, though it was abolished when Percival retired. There was, however, a delightful triumph for the plan on the only occasion when a Head Prefect seemed to go badly astray in his conception of his combined duties. This Prefect put himself down to play in a school match, greatly to the indignation of the school, who considered him not nearly good enough. He justified his action by subsequently gaining his Blue and becoming an " Inter- national" ! Perhaps the best proof of the Draconian nature of Percival's rule was that he did not hesitate to make rules for parents. One of the rules was that no boy should be accepted as.a day-boy unless his parents promised never to be away from home simultaneously during term time. The object, of course, was to ensure that no boy should be left without supervision.

What was Canon Wilson's surprise—Wilson succeeded Percival as Head Master—when a father came to his study one day and solemnly asked for permission to go away with his wife to the sea- side. Wilson was staggered, but pleasantly gave his sanction.

Of course, he was delighted that Mr. and Mrs. Blank should enjoy themselves at the seaside. It then appeared that under Percival this scrupulous father had given the ordinary promise exacted from the parents of day-boys.

Twice during his seventeen years at Clifton Percival was a candidate for the Head Mastership of Rugby, and twice he was disappointed. On the first occasion Dr. Hayman was appointed, and on the second Jet-Blake. 'Hayman was dismissed by the

Governing Body, and Jea-Blake, though an admirable master in many ways, was not quite able to pull the school out of the chaos in which Hayman had left it. The act of restoration fell to Percival after all. But before we leave the Clifton days, let us quote T. E. Brown's description of Percival :— "11/3 has lashed us into Bacchic furs wind and strings and voices ;forte, forte, fortissimo. At the end of term we sink hack on our seats and mop our foreheads and pant. He is divine ; but we want rest."

We only wish that there were more from the pen of T. E. Brown, a wish which we are sure will be shared by everyone who has read his Letters or his Fo'c'sle Yarns or his narrative poem in the Manx dialect called The Doctor. When Percival left Clifton to become President of Trinity College, Oxford, some-

body said that he felt as though one of the. Laws of Nature had gone. He had endowed Clifton with an ideal as well as

with numerous material benefactions. One who had sat long under Percival's sermons remarked that he did not like them because he did not like " being kicked." " No doubt you do not," rejoined his companion, " but he is always trying to kick you upstairs and that is something."

The complaint against Percival at Oxford was that he tried

to run Trinity as though it were a public school. The complaint bad some justice in it. We should be inclined to say that

Percival's principal achievement at Oxford was to show people ,inclined to sink into an academic atmosphere that Oxford was not really making use of her particular inspirations so long as

she failed to be in contact socially and politically with the outer world. He felt much more in his province when he became Head Master of Rugby, in 1886. His theoryof ruling schoolboys' lives had not become less rigorous with experience and the lapse of time, but be was marvelously efficient, and the school .responded to his influence as a drooping plant rises under the rays of the sun. The Bishop of Manchester gives an illuminating

example of Percival's method in small things :—

" Near the end of his reign he became annoyed at the cur- tailment of football shorts. He enacted that they were to be cut so as to reach the stocking ; no bare knees were to show, Of course, the presence of loose flannel flapping about fhe knees is a horrible inconvenience in running, and the boys turned up the ends -of the elongated shorts. Then suddenly all shorts vanished, and reappeared not only lengthened by the required amount, but equipped with an elastic band which gripped the leg just below the knee and could by no means be worn above it. But this was in his last winter, and the portentous garments were restored to normal length and form before the next football season came. round. But there was a more serious side to his Puritanism. He was ready to trust absolutely an individual boy who had not forfeited his confidence ; but in the boys as a whole he put little or no trust. He feared liberty ; with all his liberalism, he feared liberty. He wanted to see the whole day mapped out and to know what every boy was doing at any moment. This led, undoubtedly, to some stereotyping of character."

In 1895, Lord Rosebery appointed Percival Bishop of Hereford. Percival had not long 'been a Bishop before the accusation was raised that he was trying to drive High Churchmen out of the diocese. He answered that in giving an opportunity to Broad Churchmen he was only correcting the balance—he was only encouraging a school of thought which had been deplorably

discouraged. He would never admit, however, that he wanted to make 'his diocese an impossible place for High Churchmen.

The facts support him ; he respected and accepted the position of Sacerdotalists who were there, but he certainly did not want to add to their number. Lightfoot, Hort and Westcott were his intellectual masters, and to say that is to say that he could not have been really intolerant. In our opinion his whole theory of the Church of England was exactly what it ought to have been. He desired that nobody should be driven out of the Church who wished to remain a member of it. He regarded the Church as virtually co-extensive with the nation—a huge family always ready to welcome hack the errant son• of daughter, and always

thinking of that son or daughter as still a member of the family. He was continually getting into hot water with his critics, as, for example, when he relegated the Athanasian Creed in the Cathedral at Hereford to a service at which there would be few

people -to hear it. But his chief controversial struggle began when at the time of the present King's Coronation he held a joint Communion Service in the Cathedral to which Noncon- formists were invited. Here his freedom from casuistry and his

objectivity and directness reached their highest point. The Lambeth Conference had already passed a resolution encouraging the idea of reunion. According to Percival this sentiment meant something or meant nothing. If it meant something such a joint service as he held at the Cathedral' on a solemn national occasion was in exact accordance with the spirit of the Conference. We heartily agree with him. We cannot go into the intricate controversy which followed, but readers of this book can dis- cover for themselves the extraordinarily strong, historical, ecclesiastical, legal and moral grounds upon which the Bishop took his stand. Before the controversy was ended Percival was denounced by the present Bishop of Zanzibar. We like the mixture of the ironist and the schoolmaster which appear in Percival's reply :-

" For one bishop to take upon himself to excommunicate another bishop on his awn sole authority because of an alleged misuse of the patronage in his diocese is a proceeding which it is not easy to justify and which certainly does not tend to edification. And I must confess to some surprise that your natural modesty did not suggest to you that if public action was called for it should have been left to the proper authority. Hasty and ill-considered individual action such as yours could hardly be defended under any circumstances, and in this ease you would have done well to bear in mind that Canon Streeter has not even been arraigned, much less condemned, before any ecclesiastical Court or Synod, and that he continues to hold a licence to officiate from my brother bishop the Bishop of Oxford. Thus I may venture to say, AS an old man to a younger, that although acting no doubt in all sincerity and from the highest motives, you have been led to take too much upon you."

It is an odd coincidence that a few weeks ago the Bishop of Zanzibar denounced the author of this book on the ground that he had gone too far in carrying out the injunctions of the latest and greatest of Lambeth Conferences on the subject of reunion. But the Bishop of Zanzibar is not afraid of going far himself—

in effect, he excommunicated the whole Conference