BOOKS.
BISHOP FRASER'S LIFE, MR. HUGHES has shown his usual literary skill in reducing this' memoir to the dimensions of a single not too elaborate volume. Nothing is more wearisome than the constant repetitions and variations of the same material with which inexperienced biographers are apt to overwhelm their readers. What you want to know concerning even the best and most original of men, is what the man was originally like ; what were his chief inward gifts, perplexities, and trials ; what were his outward circumstances ; how far his practical endeavours succeeded or failed; to what extent his character grew with his experience of life; and with what measure of force he impressed those with whom he had to act, and those on whom he brought his influence to bear; finally, how far the whole career can be said to have ended brightly or tragically, or with what mixture of brightness and tragedy. All this Mr. Hughes tells us, or rather lets us find out for ourselves,—showing, however, no little art in the process,—in this lively volume, with respect to his friend and former tutor, Bishop Fraser. Briefly, we may say that there probably never was a serener nature than his,—a nature with leas moodiness in it, less smoke to consume, less of gloom or perplexity or inward conflict. No man ever had, so far as one can judge from the Life, less difficulty in doing his duty, or, at least, less disposition to let any one see his difficulty if he felt it, less vanity to wound, less self-distrust in taking responsible decisions, less consciousness of failure, and less self.congratulation on success. Bishop- Fraser seems to us to have been from the first, and to the last,. a man of singular equanimity and cheeriness, with a mind in which there was not a single morbid thread, incapable of vacil- lation, sound in judgment wherever the superficial indications were the true ones, not always sound in more perplexing matters,. radiant in manner, manly in temper, pure in heart and in taste, full of energetic simplicity, fond of business and excel- lently methodical, sagacious in dealing with ordinary people,. rather out of his natural sphere when he busied him- self with theology and ecclesiastical policy, but always con- fident in himself, and sometimes carrying the day by his confidence, even when he was wrong. Few men of business so resolute and confident as he, have such radiance of manner ; few men of such radiance of manner, few men whose charm is- so visible, are engines of so many horse-power. As a rule, when the mind overflows in pleasantness, there is less reserve power than there was in Bishop Fraser, for it was his peculiarity that he was as energetic as a steam-engine at the same time that he was as taking as an accomplished Oxford scholar. He is, on the whole, less interesting as a young man than as an old.. There is something almost unnatural in the serenity of his younger days,—the days of his Oxford tutorship and his- country vicarages,—days when there is no vestige of the despairs or the aspirations, the panics or the ecstasies, of youth, and when we are almost disposed to be intolerant of a mind so awfully well-regulated. The mind is the same, no doubt, in his later days ; but then there is in the sense of struggle and the consciousness of responsibility and the light- hearted self-confidence with which the Bishop's career is diversi- fied, something to distract the attention from that uniformity of sober cheerfulness that almost palls upon us in the earlier days.
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The unbroken serenity with which Mr. Fraser contested the knotty question of the structure of a church-interior with a squire whose one demand was that his back should not be
• " breathed upon" from behind, nor poked by forward-jutting prayer-books, nor exposed to mysterious draughts which no candle-flame was sensitive enough to indicate, was almost preternatural. We sigh for some outbreak of indignation, but it never comes. Then his generosity all through life is as modest and unconscious as it is unbroken. His frank outspokenness and dislike of anything like sentimentality are beyond all praise. Further, his manliness in ignoring small points of Church prestige, guiding himself on large principles, and as he put it, "taking my chance whether my own communion gains or loses thereby," leaves nothing to be desired. This was the quality by which he raised the prestige of MS Church amongst the sturdy Lancastrians. Indeed, his masculine good sense now and then becomes epigrammatic, as when be called a correspondent's attention to "the difference between Christian morality and the morality of Christians ;" or when he com- mented briefly on immoral plays by the remark,—" If the plays are bad, stay away. It is only a question of demand and supply ; you demand, and the actors supply."
We are almost fatigued by the constancy and unerring:nes -of Bishop Fraser's good sense, until we come to the higher arid more difficult questions of Church policy by which the later years On the whole, however, we entirely agree with Mr. Hughes's admirable estimate of Bishop Fraser, and cannot sum him up better than in the words of Mr. Bryce's graphic letter with which the volume concludes :—" He was a man," says Mr. Bryce, "of the old-fashioned Aristotelian High-Churchism of 1840," "with no great taste either for scientific theology or for ecclesiastical history." "His mind was like a crystal pool of water in a mountain-stream : you saw everything that was in it : you saw nothing that was mean or unworthy. It was this purity and freshness that made his character not only manly, but lovely and beautiful, beautiful in its tenderness, its loyalty to friend- ship, its love of truth. Among the public men of our day, it would be difficult to point to any more simple or noble soul." We should add that Mr. Hughes adds much to the effectiveness of this effective book, by the elevating quotations with which he heads each of its chapters, quotations which are full of power and originality, and almost always singularly applicable to the passage with which he is about to deal in Dr. Fraser's career.
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