BOOKS.

IN editing this book, Miss Church has shown in a very remark- able degree what, throughout his life, her father showed in the very highest degree,—at once delicacy and judgment. She has given us nothing that is not deeply interesting and attractive, and she has not even given us too much that is so. She has laboured no point, and yet she has produced a very powerful and living profile,— like the exquisitely charac- teristic profile which she has prefixed to the volume,—of the great Dean of St. Paul's. It is true, indeed,—and it was under the circumstances inevitable,—that she leaves us hungry for more, even when we have finished the volume. Dean Church's modesty and reserve were amongst the most characteristic features in his great character. Throughout his life he did much, without attracting to himself any notice that was at all commensurate with his influence. He managed to make the very least of a personal im- pressiveness which was unusually great, so that his earlier correspondents hardly kept his letters at all, and even his later correspondents kept them almost at haphazard. He succeeded in disguising from himself quite as fully as from any one else, the weight of authority which he really wielded even in his youth, and more and more as life went on ; and yet there was no consciousness of that dis- guise. As Canon Scott Holland, in his very acute but too laboured picture of the Dean's method of administering the deanery, puts it, he really left the initiative of his policy to others, except in so far as by the insensible sway of his • The Life and Letters of Dean Church. Edited by his daughter, Mary C. Church. With a Preface by the Dean of Christchurch. London: Macmillan and ON

own character, he determined not only who those others were to be, but how and in what sense they were to initiate their plans. And in doing so he never really knew how much he was prompting and guiding and restraining those to whom he confided that initiative which he believed him- self to be merely setting in motion. It was his most earnest delight from the first to follow, not to lead. Indeed, when he found a great and original man like Newman, he hardly became conscious for some time that he was not really able to follow him quite as implicitly as he wished. It is a conjecture which we have been forced to make when reading the history of the Anglican movement that Dr. Newman's very long delay in passing over to Rome was in no slight degree due to the restraining force exerted on his own sensitive nature,—which was full of the most delicate " feelers,"— by finding that he was not really carrying with him that most loyal and yet discriminating of his younger followers in whose judgment he showed to the very last so deep a confi- dence. It is a great disappointment not to find more letters bearing on the latter days of Dr. Newman's period of hesita-

tion at Oxford and Littlemore, though it is a disappointment which those who knew Dean Church might well have antici- pated, when they observed how completely unconscious he

was even in later days of his own share in the guidance and government of the school of thought to which he belonged. No doubt his reverence for Newman was so profound that he often kept silence when he might have spoken, and spoke, when he did speak, only to indicate that he was not convinced without indicating the processes of his own mind which restrained the earnestness of his discipleship. His admira- tion and loyalty to Newman were so deep that he was probably himself puzzled to understand why the genius which carried him so far, did not carry him farther. But we feel

sure that Newman himself must have been struck by the hesitation of a mind so loyal, so sincere, so eager to take

hip full share of responsibility for all the co-operation he bad given, and yet so evidently unable to pass the Rubicon with him. That must have been to him one of the most impressive of all the auguries which kept him back from the Roman Catholic Church.

While it is a grave disappointment to us to be shown so little of Dr. Church's mind between 1840 and 1845 as these letters show of it, it is a very pleasant surprise to find so many delightful letters of travel during the long journey by which he relieved the first pangs of the separation between Newman and himself. The letters from Greece and Con- etantinople show how much his mind needed rest, and how healthy was his enjoyment of the rest it took after the separa- tion came. They are letters of a remarkable kind, not enthu-

elastic, though there is a controlled enthusiasm in them, very far from florid,—for Dr. Church abhorred the flowery style, the perfervid style, and pruned his words even more severely

as a young man than he did as an old,—but exhibiting very eager and vivid reflectiveness, showing how powerfully the impression made on his eyes by what he saw compelled him to reflect on its characteristic drift and meaning. Here, for instance, is a striking passage on the impression made upon him by the Parthenon :—

" By this time I know Athens pretty nearly as well as I know Winchester, and I don't think I shall easily forget it. I have at last been to the Acropolis, which I left to the last. It is certainly most magnificent. The size of the Parthenon is much greater than the view of it from the town leads you to expect, and when you get up to the platform of the rock, it spreads out its colonnade, broken as it is, with a mixture of calm solemnity and brightness, which calls up the idea of a beautiful human face such as you see in Greek sculpture, as if that was the expression which the archi- tect, by his own method, meant to suggest to the beholder."

Here, too, is another striking passage showing how eagerly Dr. Church looked into the unfinished architecture he saw for traces of the history of the Peloponnesian war with which he was so familiar. He was never satisfied without connecting that which he now beheld with the eye, with that which he had beheld with his mind's eye during all the eager study of his Oxford life

:- "There are also some French architects at work, one of whom has just discovered what he supposes to be the mark of Neptune's trident (v. Herod. 8. 65; Pausanias, 26. 6; Wordsworth's Athens, 1 33). In excavating under the northern wing of the Erectheum he came to a walled chamber, in the rocky floor of which are three natural holes in a straight line, not quite equi-distant, but near enough to convey the idea of the fraa€70p ; and near it, channels ip if for water cut in the rock. There seems no reason why it should not be what it is taken for. These things bring book the past with a sort of thrill, and the Acropolis is full of these mementos. The impression of the votive shield on the east end of the Parthenon—the marks of the wheels of chariots in the rocky entrance under the Propyhea—the architect's lines and circles, still left in the unfinished basement of the columns of the Propyla3a, left unfinished from the breaking out of the Pelopon- nesian war :—the finished rustic work of the basement of the old temple which the Persians destroyed, left as part of the founda- tion of the more magnificent Parthenon, the new part of the foundation of which is continued on from it with rough blocks, to the requisite length—and the fragments of columns and triglyph. belonging to the same temple built into the northern wall of the Acropolis, in the hurry of the repairs under Themistocles—have a different effect from that of mere repairs; they bring back the sort of private history, and the everyday business of Giese times' it is like catching a glimpse of the men themselves ; it in some measure peoples the scene."

But Dr. Church never omits the human traits, which interest him and bring out his delightful humour quite as vividly as the sculptare and the architecture bring out his keen historical and artistic interests. Nothing can be more vivid than his sketch of the Parliamentary parties at Athens tinder King Otho in 1846, and of the crafty, though rather stupid, old Minister who took almost all the portfolios into his own hands. That, however, is too long for extract. But here is an admirable sketch of the Greek guards who accompanied him in one of his excursions :—

" My Greek guards are immense fun with the macintosh air- bed which I have with me. They have taken it into their special care, and are just like children with it, racing one against another, which shall fill a compartment first with the bellows, or with their mouth. They consider it a wonder of art, and intend to floor their friends at Athens with riddles about a man whom they have seen, who sleeps on wind. They are capital attendants, and quite watch every want which they fancy I may have. It is very curious to be among these wild people with their pistols and daggers and scimitars, mounted with silver ; the passion for ornamental arms is quite a ruling one with them ; and Govern- ment indulges it by allowing the irregular troops, and the police, etc. (besides some not very creditable retainers of the great men), to dress as they like, and to sport all sorts of dangerous weapons."

Again, nothing can be more striking than Dr. Church's picture of Constantinople and the Turks,—in whose nature and history he felt the same deep interest which Cardinal Newman always displayed. Indeed we may add that he felt the same deep sympathy with Mr. Gladstone's Eastern policy,—a policy not at that time at all popular in England :—

" I can hardly tell you what I feel about this strange place ; a queer mixture of feelings, the general effect of which at present is disagreeable, tending towards disgust. In the first place, the place itself is undoubtedly very grand. I don't know that it is what I should call beauty that strikes me in the views I have had of it, so much as the imperial magnificence of its position and appearance ; the spread of the city and its suburbs in all directions, over the swell of the hills, and along their summits, and along the shore of the sea wherever you look ; its apparently endless extent, with the great quantity of it which can be seen at once ; the profusion of verdure within it, bright greens, set off by the black cypress groves of the cemeteries and the majestic outline of the main city, produced very much by some three or

four great mosques, with their minarets and great low domes, which crown the highest point of ground in it. Then there is the sea all round, and in various shapes—a magnificent port in the Golden Horn—a broad winding river in the Bosphorus—and again, with its islands and capes, and open horizon, the Sea of

Marmora, covered with ships of all sizes, and showing the greatest variety of flags I have ever seen. In its beauty I think I was disappointed ; but not in its grandeur. Then, when you get into it, there is still plenty of oriental life to be seen ; there are crowds, partly in a state of the most perfect quiescence and meditative repose, partly in a state of violent action—pushing, jostling, and especially screaming and yelling, with confounding energy ; there are veiled women, shovelling and sliding along in their yellow boots; there are turbans, and kalpacs, and fezzes ; there is also the great estate of the dogs, the free and independent dogs, who never get out of the way for man or horse. But, as you know, the Turks have been Europeanised of late, and there is a stupid mongrel air about these crowds ; and with the exception of some old-fashioned, grave, proud-looking, green and white turbans, who disdain to show their remarkably ugly legs in tight white pantaloons and straps, the Turks look like people who hardly know whether they are standing on their heads or heels, and this, I believe, is pretty much the case with them. They seem to me like people who are put out of their way and don't know how to behave themselves, as if Stamboul was transported bodily into Regent Street or the Rue de Rivoli, and they feel in their own city the sort of awkwardness and soggesione that they would feel in the West."

The pictures of scenery, too, show a delicate reflectiveness

which is in the highest degree original and charming. We must not extract more, but may refer to the picture which Dr. Church's letters to his brother give us of the scenery of the Mores, especially of the mountain range of Taygetus and of the valley of the Styx. The letters of foreign travel are full of that eager, almost scientific, activity which forms so interesting a contrast to Dr. Newman's letters from the islands of Greece and Sicily written at about the same age. But Newman's letters were letters written on the eve of a great crisis in his history; Church's, on the morrow of such a crisis. And the latter naturally display the activity of that deeply reflective mind which had held him back from taking the great plunge on which his master had ventured. Newman's letters from the Mediterranean were full of the glow of an eager though only half-conscious theological purpose. Church's are fall of the sense of rebound after passing through a stage in which his scientific sympathies with the germinal science of the day, had been almost overpowered by his deeper sympathies with the religions ardour of a great preacher. The contrast is intensely interesting and curious. We must leave for another notice that part of Dr. Church's life which best illustrates the striking picture drawn of the Dean in Dr. Paget's admirable preface, and Canon Scott Holland's vivid and vivacious, if somewhat too elaborate and eloquent, study.