ARCHBISHOP TRENCH.* As Archbishop Trench desired that no Life of

him should be written, the editor of these volumes has been placed in difficult circumstances. To print the correspondence without some biographical details would have been to destroy its value ; to relate many incidents of Trench's career would be to disregard his wishes. A middle course has therefore been pursued, and the result, as in most compromises of the kind, is by no means satisfactory. The reader of the book will find himself fre- quently asking questions to which he gains no answer, and when the volumes are closed, his impression of the central character will be somewhat vague and misty. Some of the features stand out prominently ; but all the man is not seen in his letters, and while we listen to his opinions, we are seldom brought into his presence.

• (1.) Richard Cheneoix Trench, Archbishop t Letters and Memorials. Edited by the Author of "Charles Lowder." 2 vols.—(2.) Westminster and other Sermons. By Richard Ohenevix Trench, D.D., Archbishop. London: Regan Paul. The first volume is by far the most attractive. The story of the Disestablishment of the Church in Ireland, which fills a large portion of the second, has passed into the region of ancient history, and the familiar, and in many respects pain- ful, narrative has no novel aspect, and can scarcely be retold with advantage. We at least could readily spare this elaborate account of a stormy ecclesiastical struggle which occupies much space that might be better filled. That the Archbishop took part in it with great decision and vigour, and with thorough sincerity of purpose, his most eager opponents can scarcely have been disposed to doubt. Trench, like Swift, was "only Irish through the accident of birth," being French by descent on both sides of the house. His love of study began early, for at the age of sixteen his mother writes :— "Richard has a craving for books He delights in referring, collating, extracting. He wishes much we should purchase a certain polyglot, and luxuriates in the idea of finding fifteen readings of the same passage in Scripture'. Two years later he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and made with Sterling and Maurice perhaps the dearest friend- ships of his life. "In Sterling," he wrote five years later, "I should lose a friend to whose shaping intellect during years of familiar intercourse my mind is indebted for the very- little it possesses. I owe him an unpayable debt." And the editor states that not only was Sterling one of the dearest amongst his early friends, but his name was on the aged Archbishop's lips in his very last days. For Maurice, toe,. Trench cherished through life, and in spite of differences, the deepest affection, and the love he gave was returned in large measure. Maurice, Sterling, and Trench belonged to the little society known as "The Apostles," and this fact comprises nearly all that we are told of the Archbishop's University life. "I should look back," he writes to Kemble, " upon my Cambridge career with unmingled regret for wasted time, &c., were it not for the friendships I have formed, and opinions I have imbibed (but for these I owe the University nothing) ; and among these connections I look on none with greater pleasure than my election to the Apostles, and trust that it will prove a con- nection that will not be dissolved with many of its members during life." It is curious to read, but whether Trench's statement is exactly correct we do not know, that in the first year of its existence the Athenzrium was written entirely by Apostles. Sterling had a share in the paper, and asks his friend, who was a contributor to its columns, if he is inclined to buy it for little more than a hundred pounds.

Trench's ambition did not lie in this direction. Already he had written a tragedy which won the high praise of Macready, who said it ought to be acted, but, for some unexplained reason, it never was. Already, too, he had mastered Spanish, and his admiration of Calderon was destined to yield good fruit later on. He had written poems also, most of which were published, so that he began his successful literary career at an early period of life. It was a time of high enthusiasm and generous ambition. Carlyle, in his Life of Sterling, describes the ill-starred expedition of General Torrijos and his band of patriots, to effect, as they fondly hoped, a revolution in Spain. Trench sailed with them secretly, but on reaching Gibraltar, his dream of freedom melted away, and he returned to England to marry and take holy orders.

Tbe bare facts of his life after this strange episode may be found in these pages. Successful as an author, singularly successful from the worldly point of view as a clergyman, happy in troops of friends, happy as a sacred poet, most happy in his marriage, Trench was not exempted from the common lot, and sorrowed bitterly for the loss of children. So much, at least, we are permitted to learn from the corre- spondence, but, on the whole, we see far more of Trench in his position as a theologian and Church dignitary, than in his domestic relations.

The atmosphere is, therefore, a little confined, and sometimes oppressive ; but in the early letters of his Oxford friends, and in Trench's occasional remarks about books and people, the reader escapes into a freer air. How much he loved and was- beloved, is evident throughout, and the fact that he could be devotedly attached to F. D. Maurice and Sterling, and feel at the same time the tenderest affection for Bishop Wilberforce, shows that his sympathies were not confined within a narrow groove. Trench belonged to the Sterling Club, of which Wilberforce was also a member, and he relates how on one occasion Mikes, in his delight at seeing him, threw his arm round his neck, so that he had some trouble in disengaging himself. Trench seems to have been welcome everywhere, and sought after by men of mark long before he owed anything to his position in life. Arthur Hallam went up to Trinity about a year before Trench left the University. The two young men in their pursuits and hopes had much in common, and several beautiful letters of Hallam are inserted. In one of them he writes :—" I am now at Sowerby, not only as the friend of Alfred Tennyson, but as the lover of his sister. An attach- ment on my part of near two years' standing, and a mutual engagement of one year, are, I fervently hope, only the commencement of an union which circumstances may not impair and the grave itself not conclude." He regrets that his friend did not know more of Tennyson, but observes that

4' perhaps you could never become very intimate, for certainly your bents of mind are not the same, and at some points they

intersect." In another letter, addressed to Trench at Malvern a few days after his marriage, Hallam says :—

"Do you not agree with me that the extensive landscape on which you look from Malvern has something of an Italian character? It seemed to my eye (a short-sighted one, to be sure) to resemble parts of Lombardy. I have not been since at the place itself, but last year I saw the old hills from a distance, and though it was but for a moment, that second association with Malvern is likely to be more durable in me than the first, for I was not alone, but in the company of one who makes all that comes near her holy to my imagination. However, I know not why I should say this to you, who have been married now the enormous time of ten days, and may think yourself entitled to laugh at romantic young bachelors. I wish with all my heart I could see any prospect of being laughed at, or anything else, by your proper self in presence; for I find daily how much I miss the assistance and support of your conversation and example."

Sterling's letters, of which there are several, show a mind full of intellectual activity and devoted to the highest sub- jects. He acknowledges, as Trench also does, his great obli- gations to Coleridge, and in a lesser degree to Edward Irving.

In Schleiermacher he finds "infinite food for reflection," and, strangely enough, after alluding to Newman, considers Pusey by much the most interesting of the Oxford theologians. Maurice he regarded as "the only man of genius in theology -that has been an ardent Church of England man, for a hundred and fifty years." Sterling's views of the Church as an institu-

tion were such as would be regarded by High Churchmen as latitudinarian. "The more earnestly," he writes, "I strive to know and do the will of God, the less I seem disposed to admit anything like the claims of a hierarchy, venerable though it may be as a monument and useful as an instrument ; or to believe in any normal outward institution by Christ or the Apostles of rulers and teachers in the Church. The divine authority of such seems to me merely identical with their evangelic value." Trench's own opinions as a Churchman .changed considerably as he advanced in life. In his earlier years he frequently attended the ministry of Edward Irving ; when Archbishop of Dublin, he pronounced it unlawful for a Churchman to be present at or to take part in a Dissenting service, and he regretted that the law did not allow him to prevent evening communions. It is needless to say that the Archbishop had no sympathy with some of the views of

Maurice ; but he appreciated the sincerity and nobility of his character, and in the troubles that arose at King's College, thought he had been treated with scant justice. "Who will -be a teacher there P" he wrote; "who, at least, but one who veers to each popular breath, if it only needs a sufficiently vigorous and sustained cry on the part of Records, Morning Posts, and Quarterlys to make him a suspected man ?" Canon Liddon, who shows, as might, perhaps, have been anticipated, little capacity for judging of Maurice's character or work, writes of Trench and of his friendship with Maurice as follows :— " Linked as he was by his habitual reverence, and by his sense of the mysteriousness of the human world—its origin and its destiny—to the High Church party, as taking, on the whole, that view of Divine revelation which was most in accordance with the nature of things, he was partly divided from it by two personal sympathies, which belonged, as I suppose, to his early mental history. One was his admiration of Luther, whom he thought a true interpreter of the mind of St. Paul, and whose theory of Justification did not appear to him to be inconsistent with the interests of morality The other was his friendship for F. D. Maurice. Certainly he did not endorse Maurice's language in the Theological Essays' on the atonement, or on eternal punish- ment. But Maurice's singular egotism, assuming the form of a quasi-prophetic claim, and his irrepressible tendency to paradox on the most serious subjects, did not inspire the Archbishop, or (as he than was) the Professor, with the feelings of distrust and some- thing more which both Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble felt. Probably

the Archbishop considered Maurice chiefly in the light of a person who made men think, and so did not pay so much attention to other sides of his influence."

We have little doubt that Trench regarded his friend in a light altogether, different from that suggested by Canon Liddon. Of the lively talk and pleasant gossip we generally look for in letters, there are few traces in these "Memorials." The correspondence is full of good sense, and of that higher quality known in the pulpit as unction. But poet though the Archbishop was, rarely for a moment does he forget—and assuredly his friends Sterling and Maurice do not—the intense seriousness of life.

No attempt has been made by the editor to estimate Trench's 'position, either as a poet and man of letters or as a theologian, and we shall not undertake a task now that would need an elaborate article. But we may say, before closing the volumes, that there is little, indeed, whether in verse or prose, which Trench has written that does not claim a place in literature, and thoughtful and wholly free from clap-trap though it be, the public have acknowledged the claim. The Archbishop has had the rare good-fortune not only to attract scholars and theological students, but also the general reader. The editor modestly observes that these " Memorials " are few and faint. This is true, but they suffice to make us wish that it had been permitted us to gain a more familiar acquaintance with a distinguished and earnest-minded man.

A word must suffice in conclusion with regard to the volume of sermons published simultaneously with the "Memorials." The profound earnestness of the speaker is seen in them, and they are, to use a much-abused word, strongly evangelical. If we add that they are likely to have had a greater effect in the pulpit than as printed discourses, the criticism is not unfavourable to the preacher. It is seldom that a sermon lays hold of a reader as powerfully as it may have affected a con- gregation. In all oratory, whether secular or sacred, much depends and ought to depend on the personality of the speaker,—on the look, the voice, and the gestures, and above all, on the impression made by his sincerity.