Shorter Notices
T. B. Strong. By Harold Anson. (S.P.C.K. 8s. 6d.)
Mawr OF RIPON though Dr. Strong was for five years and Bishop of Oxford for twelve, it is as Tommy Strong of the House that generations of Oxford men will remember him. That is as it should be, for he managed a college much better than a diocese, and in the forty-one years he ,spent at Christ Church, from/he day he entered It as undergraduate in 1879 to the day he left it as Dean in 1920, he impressed as deep a mark on the University, of which he was Vice-Chancellor from 1913 to 1917, as on the college itself. The Master of the Temple, one of Strong's old pupils, has sketched with a light and skilful hand the Head of a House and the Head of two dioceses, the chief criticism to be made of his work being that it includes too little of his own handiwork and too much quotation of the "Canon X.Y.Z. writes . . . " type. Strong was an unusual and strangely attractive character, by reason quite as much of his defici- encies as of his virtues. He was not an ideal Bishop. He was shy, he was a dull preacher, he was unbusinesslike—on one occasion he completely forgot an important confirmation service at Eton, on another he thought he would be unable to keep an engagement at a village church, and having written to ask not one but both of his suffragans to take his place he turned up himself as well—and he liked ceremonial much less than many of his incumbents did ; when one of them on his arrival at the church door enquired, "May I ask, my Lord, where your pastoral staff is ? " he replied with an engaging smile " I'm really not quite sure, but I hope it's lost " and suggested that his rain-soaked umbrella might do as substitute. With these agreeable vagaries was associated a deep spirituality of which only his closest friends were fully conscious. Canon Anson's memoir, though brief, is adequate. This is one of the cases in which to have said more might well have revealed less.
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