BISHOP JOHN WORDSWORTH.*

Jona Wonnswonm was the son and grandson of men of high distinction In their University. His grandfather was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. His father was a Fellow of the same College, Senior Classic, and first Chancellor's Medallist. He was the first to decipher the graffiti of Pompeii and to determine the site of Dodona, and, unfortunately for himself, he turned away from pure scholarship and became Head- Master of Harrow. The love of scholarship was inherited by his son, but he also owed something to the family of his grandmother, a sister of Charles Lloyd, the friend of Charles Lamb. John Wordsworth describes the Lloyds as having "a good deal of business shrewdness and capacity, tempered by a taste for poetry and a strong sense of religion." The first of these characteristics was not developed in the grandson till middle life, but it was then strongly marked. In his own opinion, a certain facility for verse-writing which he also possessed came "far more from the Lloyds than the Wordsworths." Dr. Watson adds that "those nearest to the Bishop of Salisbury hold that many of his characteristics were those of a Frere rather than of a Wordsworth" —his mother being a niece of John Hookham From and a cousin of Sir Bartle Frees. In the first instance it seemed as if John Wordsworth had nothing before him but what he once described as "the frozen monotony of a tyrannical life which some schoolmasters lead." Though he had done so well at Winchester as to be elected to New College in his seventeenth year, he took only a Second Class in Greats, and he stood unsuccessfully for four fellowships. But in 1867, while working at • Life oj Bishop John Wordsworth. By E. W. Watson, D.D. Begins Professor Of Ecclesiastical -History in the University of Oxford. London: Longman' and Co. i.12a. Od. net.)

Wellington under Benson, he heard on a Saturday that there was a vacancy at Brasenose College, and that the examiners were "looking for an exact scholar, like Wordsworth." The examination was to begin on the following Monday, but there was just time for him to send in his name, and on the following Friday he was elected.

Eighteen years of happy and useful work followed. He took Orders in the same year without, says Dr. Watson, ever having been troubled by speculative doubts, or passing then, or afterwards, through any "crisis of feeling." He was at once appointed to a tutorship, to which was added three years later a special lectureship for members of the College who might be reading for the newly created Honours School of Theology. He devoted himself in the first instance to early Latin literature and the inscriptions, a study which bore fruit some years later

in his Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin—still the best introduction in English to the subject. The preparation of a written exposition

suited Wordsworth better than lecturing. But for the most part his listeners "wanted to learn as much as would be useful in the schools, and to learn it in a form that might be reproduced in examination. These found his lectures unpractical." On the other hand, the present Warden of Keble speaks of being awed and impressed by his "combination of knowledge with a kind of tentative humility which was feeling its way

in and out of the very corners, and which was willing to listen to any

suggestion from a pupil." The only rival to scholarship which appealed to Wordsworth was theology. His first efforts in this direction were given to the maintenance of religious tests. The University, and still more the College, were Christian institutions "pledged to inculcate a specific form of Christian belief." Though the attempt to retain legal sanction for the old system failed, Wordsworth, with great encourage- ment from Benson and Westcott, did his best to give religious teaching a place in his own College. He also took an active share in the protest against the prosecutions under the Public) Worship Regulation Act.

The idea of James Mozley's graduate Divinity Class was started at a dinner in his rooms, and after the breakdown in Mozley's health he took

over what was possible of the Regius Professor's work. In 1883 he was elected to the Professorship of Scripture Interpretation, which carried with it a fellowship at Oriel and a canonry at Rochester.

In the former the present Provost says that he threw himself whole-heartedly into the life of the College in all its aspects and left a lasting memory behind.

The best evidence of his devotion to Oxford is his refusal to give uy his work there for a benefice at a time when his marriage depended or it. Happily the trial was not a long one. He became engaged tt Susan Coxe—whom Dr. Watson justly describes as "pro-eminent al Oxford" (as afterwards at Salisbury) "for gifts and charm "—in May 1869, and by the December of the following year " the two fathers agreed to make up the amount of the fellowship that would be forfeited," and the marriage took place. Space does not allow us to follow him through his twenty-five years' episcopate. Ho had very high conceptions of

his office, and a certain angularity of character combined with a strong sense of duty often brought him into conflict with some of his clergy who held opposite opinions with equal sincerity. But his high con-

scientiousness and his natural kindliness secured the respect, and even

the affection, of those who differed most from him. We must not close without a word on a part of his work by which he will eventually be

best remembered, the preparation of the first critical edition of the Vulgate New Testament. Dr. Watson has wisely entrusted the chapter which deals with this subject to Dr. H. J. White, who was Wordsworth's

constant associate in the enterprise. The Bishop had promised to write the Latin preface to the Editio Minor, which appeared in 1911, and would have done so but for his death after only a day or two's illness.