Lord Beaconsfield has made a fair appointment to the diocese
of Lichfield. The Rev. W. D. Maclagan, Vicar of Kensington, belongs, as closely as possible, to the school of Dr. Selwyn, and like him, has earned a great reputation as an administrator, though it has been in London parishes, and not in a colonial see. The London parishes are the more difficult to govern of the two, and both in Newington and Kensington Mr. Maclagan has earned a reputation for wisdom, sympathy, and indefatigable industry in work. All three qualities will be wanted in Lichfield, one of the most oppressive sees in the kingdom, if only because of the ex- treme vivacity of the opposing opinions within its limits. Mr. Maclagan is called a High Churchman, but that seems only to mean that he believes in the Church of which he is to be a Bishop,—not, on the whole, a bad primary qualifica- tion. He is a Scotchman, bred up in Episcopalianism, he has been in India, he received charge of a great parish from Lord Hatherley,—and he has received a great Bishopric from a Broad-Church Sovereign, and a Premier who believes that nothing is certainly true except race, and considers the particular race whose Church he regulates "flat-nosed barbarians." Mr. Mac- lagan ought under those circumstances to have a mind capable of sympathising with most people, even the parishioners who write calumnious letters against their Rectors, and who, as a rule, have of all human beings the most sensitive consciences and the greatest contempt for evidence.
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