"SEVEN SAGES OF DURHAM."*
DEAN KITCHIN has authority for a somewhat extended use of the word "sage." It would be difficult to frame a definition of the word which would include Peter Smart, whom an unbridled tongue brought into such trouble, and Bishop William War- burton. The curious thing is that for the latter the Dean has scarcely a good word to say. He bestows upon him, indeed, the most opprobrious term that he can find in his vocabulary : he was "a predecessor of the Mafeking school of patriots." After eighteen pages of invective, "his whole life and energies were given up to literary quarrellings and abuse" is a specimen ; he "bids him farewell with an indulgent smile." If this is the fashion of the Dean's smile, what must be the aspect of his frown ? Apart from this essay, which is a deplorable exhibition of over-emphasis, the book is a pleasant one. The first of the seven biographies or portraits represents the famous bibliophile Richard Bury, or Richard d'Aunger- ville of Bury, who was Bishop from 1333 to 1345. His story is curiously characteristic of the times. His predecessor shows the worst type of inedimval prelates ; his own elevation to the See was brought about by an abuse. The Pope had given him a "provision" for the preferment, and another man, who had been regularly elected and consecrated, had to leave it. It is pleasant to read that the two Bishops lived in harmony ; and when the dispossessed man died, Bishop Richard said of him, "He was more fit to be Pope of Rome than such a man as I am is to hold even one of the lesser dignities of the Church." It was no easy place to fill, for the Bishop was a secular prince in a stormy time and at a place where the wind was at its strongest. Still, he had for a con- solation his passion for books, though this same passion may have been one of the causes which brought him, to poverty so dire that his dead body was covered with the shirt of a stable boy. After Bishop Richard comes Thomas Wilson, to whom, layman though he was, Elizabeth gave the Deanery. He held it for something less than two years. It is doubtful whether he ever came into residence. Peter Smart was a fierce Puritan, who was wrought to something like madness by the High Church movement of Laud. His local opponent was Cosin, who certainly comes out the better from the controversy. Isaac Basire was a great traveller—Evelyn calls him a" French
• Seven Sages of Durham. By G. W. Kitchin, D.D. London T. Fisher Vnwin. r78. 6d. net.]
Apostle "—who spent the time of the Puritan domination in serving the cause of the Church abroad. Denis Glanville was Dean from 1684 to 1691, when he followed the banished Stuarts to France. And, finally, after Bishop Warburton, we have the great Butler, of " Analogy " fame. We cannot deal with such a subject here, but we may Bay that the Dean's estimate of the man and his work is well worth study, even though we may think more than he is inclined to do of the great maxim that "probability is the guide of life."
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