*

In March, 1835, he married his first cousin, one of the daughters of his uncle, the Rev. Samuel Alford, rector of Currey-Rivell. He had previously accepted from his college the vicarage of Wymeswold, Leicestershire, poorly endowed, with a population partly agricultural, but chiefly composed of framework-knitters and their families. In the beautiful early summer of that year (having brought his bride with him by the way to the splendid installation of Lord Camden as Chancellor of Cambridge) he settled at Wymeswold, and soon won the respect and affection of his parishioners by the simplicity and kindliness of his life amongst them, his readiness to minister to their wants, and the singular earnestness, clearness, and instructiveness of his unwritten sermons. The versatility of which I have spoken, showed itself in many ways. He with his own hands improved the organ, played it himself in the services, led the singing, with the noble voice and rare musical skill which were one day to find more conspicuous exercise at Canterbury. Gradually his powers became known and appreciated in the whole surrounding country. The late Lady Sitwell, of Rempstone Hall, became one of his warmest friends, and under her roof he met from time to time distinguished guests, who learnt to value him, and to feel that the place in which his lot was cast, was scarcely the appropriate sphere of his usefulness. In himself I scarcely saw any token of desire for a larger field of labour; it was his appointed place for the present, and he sought only to fill it, and to redeem time for his great work as a student and expositor of Scripture. A valued friend of later days was the Rector of Loughborough, Archdeacon Fearon, whose sympathy never failed.

During the quiet years of his life at Wymeswold, four children (two daughters and two sons) were born to him. The two sons were early taken away. Clement, the younger, died in 1844, an infant; Ambrose, the elder, in 1850. Both were laid in the quiet churchyard, near the western window of the south aisle. The church had been beautifully restored, mainly through the vicar's exertions, in 1845 and 1846, and that aisle was regarded as hallowed in remembrance of Clement. The death of Ambrose, a boy of great promise, caused his father the deepest sorrow.

His family life is a subject almost too sacred for the pen even of an intimate friend. I can only say that from first to last, at Wymeswold or at Canterbury, it was the simplest, the fullest of affection abundantly returned, of thought and care for all who came within its circle, the purest from all alloy of selfishness or worldliness, that I have ever known or could have imagined.

In 1852 Mr. and Mrs. Alford spent three months in London, in order to obtain some educational advantages for their daughters.

*Perhaps the most remarkable instance of it was given in the fact that in the last fifteen years of his busy life, he began to paint in water colours, and very soon won a really forward place among amateur painters of landscape.

During their stay he several times preached at St. Michael's, Chester Terrace, for his long-tried friend and former neighbour in Leicestershire, Mr. Hamilton. The extraordinary excellence of his sermons, written and unwritten, made a deep impression on all who heard them. Mr. Hamilton and his excellent friend Mr. Hampden Gurney determined, if possible, to bring the Vicar of Wymeswold to London. In 1853 Mr. Gurney succeeded in effecting an arrangement by which he himself became lessee of Quebec Chapel, situated in the parish of St. Mary, Bryanston Square; and immediately appointed Mr. Alford minister of the chapel. In every part of the arrangement, and in the whole history of the relations between the two friends during the following four years, the generous and noble character of Mr. Gurney was conspicuously shown. The warm friendship thus cemented was only interrupted by his death in 1861. Mr. Gurney paid a last visit to the deanery at Canterbury even after his fatal illness had begun, but was compelled to return hastily to town, and died within a few days. Some of our readers will remember the change speedily wrought in Quebec Chapel by the new appointment. The morning congregation rapidly increased. The afternoon service, which at that time was too often regarded as one of little importance, became as largely attended as that in the morning. The sermon at that service was unwritten and expository. Educated men from all sides came to follow the course of the exposition. An evening service, by his curate, was added, to meet the wants of the district conventionally assigned to the chapel. Mr. Gurney had been anxious to arrange that his friend's time during the week should, as far as possible, be left free for study. Mr. Alford lived in Hamilton Terrace, St. John's Wood. His mornings were given to unremitting work on his Greek Testament; his afternoons to pastoral visits; his evenings again to study. More and more, as he became better known, the claims of the people committed to his care took up time and thought, and became a continually increasing difficulty in the way of the completion of his Greek Testament. This consideration, more than any other, reconciled him to the separation from his flock, when in the early spring of 1857 Lord Palmerston offered him the vacant Deanery of Canterbury.

A large number of his morning sermons at Quebec Chapel have been published, and may enable even those who never heard him preach to form some notion of his powers as a preacher. A shrewd and rather severe judge of sermons, who heard him in 1855, on being asked what he thought, said drily, that "he thought it spoke well for London that such sermons should be so popular." This critic from the North had expected, doubtless, to hear either a great orator, or a very powerful and original thinker, and had been disappointed. But he had felt truly that the sermons had a peculiar charm for people who went to church, not for an intellectual feast, but to gain

help in living the Christian life; and that it was a token for good that people who went for this purpose were so many. Such was, indeed, the real attraction of his preaching. To put forth clearly and fully the great truths on which the Christian life depends for its existence and development; to unfold to view the nature and practical fruits of the life itself; to appeal earnestly to the conscience of every man on the question whether he himself was living it in reality; to help and encourage those who were struggling to begin it, and to carry it on to its completion; this, and this alone, was the preacher's aim. But truth was always presented, not as a formula, but as a living reality, freshly apprehended. Prevailing errors of practice, the fashionable sins and selfishness of private and public life, were fearlessly exposed, with manly warmth and earnestness of expostulation. Eloquence was never sought; but the unconscious eloquence which clothes high and holy thought in language worthy of its subject and its aim was seldom wanting. Those who came for Christian instruction and guidance never went away disappointed. There were sermons of which very far more might have been justly said. But so much as this was true of his sermons, always and everywhere—in country churches, in London, at Canterbury.

His new home and official duties at Canterbury were in many ways very pleasant to him. For a while he enjoyed the companionship of the Dean of Westminster, then one of the canons of Canterbury, with whom he formed a fast friendship. The cathedral itself, so rich in historical associations, was an unceasing object of care and interest. His musical knowledge and taste found ample scope in its services. The Sunday afternoon sermon was his own institution, which he did his very best to make effective for good. He worked willingly to put everything connected with the cathedral into order; its fabric, its property, its grammar-school. He felt a lively sympathy with the work of the adjoining Missionary College of St. Augustine; and showed all possible kindness to the little community of French Protestants who have worshipped since Queen Elizabeth's days in the crypt of the Metropolitan Cathedral of England. For everything which concerned the city he was always ready to labour.

We must retrace from its commencement the progress of the great work by which his name will be remembered in future years. Even at Cambridge his knowledge of the Greek Testament had been remarkable. His study of it had been carried on during the busiest years of his early life. Gradually he withdrew himself from tuition, and gave himself more and more entirely to the necessary preparation for the undertaking which he had long contemplated. Before the summer of 1849 was over the text and notes of his Greek Testament were in type as far as the end of St. Mark, and in the following spring the first volume with its Prolegomena was published. The second volume appeared in the autumn of 1852, while he was still at Wymeswold; and the third three years after his removal to London,

in the summer of 1856; the first half of the fourth volume in 1859, and its second half, completing the work, in 1861. The progress of the work was continually checked by the necessity of revising the text and notes of the earlier volumes for new and improved editions. After his removal to Canterbury he found zealous and able helpers in the details of this necessary revision in his secretaries, the Rev. A. W. Grafton and the Rev. R. Hake. But all was done under his own careful supervision. It was his anxious wish to make each new edition as perfect as the means and time at his command would allow. The effects of revision were, of course, most conspicuous in the first volume, which in its later editions is almost a new book.

I wish entirely to disclaim the office of a critic. I loved him too well, and was allowed, at least by sympathy, to be too closely associated with the commencement of his labours on the Greek Testament to be an impartial judge of its merits and deficiencies. No man could be more fully aware than Dean Alford himself of the latter. He was well aware that to form a standard text of the whole Greek Testament, and to comment worthily upon its text when settled, were works either of which would alone be beyond the powers of any one man. But he felt (and those who remember the state of critical and exegetical knowledge in England five-and-twenty years ago will not deny that he felt rightly) that before such a work could be undertaken with any hope of success or usefulness, it was necessary to put English-speaking students into possession of the accumulated results of the labours of the great scholars of Germany, in so far as those results are really trustworthy. This preparatory work he felt that he could do, not perfectly, but usefully, and that in doing this he should be rendering valuable service to the cause of divine truth. The work which he did in making those critical and exegetical helps, which had hitherto been the property in England only of a few readers of German, to become the common heritage of all educated Englishmen, was a work which no other man of his own generation could have achieved equally well, or was likely to have attempted. His industry was wonderful; his power of getting through work such as I have never known equalled. No man could sum up more clearly and concisely the conflicting opinions of others; none could, on the whole, exercise a fairer or more reasonable judgment between them. No man could be more honestly anxious to arrive at truth: he shirked no difficulty which he felt; he kept back nothing which he believed. On all critical and exegetical questions he was always open to conviction, and never ashamed to confess a change of opinion. It would have been strange indeed if, in the progress of such a work, and helped after a time by fellow-labourers on portions of the same field, for whom his own work had prepared the way, he had not frequently found improvement possible and necessary. His own scholarship and that of others had greatly advanced during the years of incessant labour which passed between 1850 and 1870; and he and he gave his

readers, as far as possible, the benefit of the advance. The very materials on which judgment was to be exercised had been largely increased, by the labours of Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Scrivener, on the text, and of Bishops Wordsworth and Ellicott, and other eminent scholars in England, and in Germany. Above all, he knew but one aim-to approximate as nearly as his knowledge would allow to that exposition of every passage which should truly express the mind of the Divine Author. He dreaded theories of Inspiration; but no man ever lived and studied under a deeper conviction that every part of Scripture was given by inspiration of God, and expressed a wisdom which no human mind could exhaust. To trace out the truth revealed everywhere, and apply it for the building up of mind and heart in the knowledge and love of God, was the one object with which he worked as an expositor; even as his one aim in criticism was to approach, as nearly as the available evidence would allow, to the original verity of God's word written.

We read now with a solemn feeling of its entire truth the language in which, nine years ago, he expressed his one desire with regard to the success of the great work of his life, then just completed.

"I have now only to commend to my gracious God and Father this feeble attempt to explain the most mysterious and glorious portion of His revealed Scriptures; and with it, this my labour of now eighteen years herewith completed. I do it with humble thankfulness, but with a sense of utter weakness before the power of His Word, and inability to sound the depths even of its simplest sentence. May He spare the hand which has been put forward to touch His ark! May He, for Christ's sake, forgive all rashness, all perverseness, all uncharitableness, which may be found in this book, and sanctify it to the use of His Church; its truth, if any, for teaching; its manifold defects, for warning. My prayer is and shall be, that in the stir and labour of men over His Word, to which these volumes have been one humble contribution, others may arise and teach, whose labours shall be so far better than mine, that this book, and its writer, may ere long be utterly forgotten.

66 6
"AMHN EPXOY KYPIE 'IHΣOY.'”

Those who knew the Dean will feel that this was with him the language of the simplest truth.

In the spirit of those words, those who know him best are sure that his whole life had been spent. He had not sought wealth, or fame, or influence. If any of them were given he accepted them thankfully, and enjoyed them fearlessly as a gift from God. But they were not his object, whether in the pulpit or in the study. He aimed to know God's truth for himself, to speak it to others, and to live it faithfully. And as he lived, so in the appointed time he has died—in the simplicity of a child-like faith. His appointed work was done, and he lay down to rest like the child at evening.

I have disclaimed the critic's part with reference to his theological labours, and am still less disposed to attempt to discuss his opinions with regard to the ecclesiastical questions of the present and the future. No fairer or more generous estimate of these, by one who thinks them