which people were strongly declaring | nities, of the dignity of labor. Or again themselves. He simply addressed the at Wolverhampton, what a chord he audience as "brother Yorkshiremen," and touched, and how it vibrated from heart appealed to their sense of fairness to give him a hearing as a son of the great apostle of freedom who had once represented their county. In his diary he refers to this gathering. "The meeting enormous and quite successful, God be praised." Not a word about the applause or the offer of the working-men to accompany him home as a guard of honor. to heart when he said, “Every man who understands what it is to labor, if it is only the putting of a pin's head on the top of a pin, if he does that work as to the Lord, is doing the very thing the angels are doing in Heaven. He is doing the work God gave him to do." He was once hissed on another and very different occasion. It was at a great demonstration in favor of Church and State, then threatened by Mr. Gladstone's resolution on the Irish Church. It was a very large assemblage, with four archbishops, four dukes, eighteen earls, four viscounts, twenty-one bishops, and twelve barons present. The bishop was received with great cheering and a few hisses on referring to the latter he said: ance, we should be able to go on with the business of the meeting; but if those sibilant persons think that I am so young that their inoffensive noise can stand in the way of my speaking upon this resolution, I can tell them they have mistaken their man. His reception at the Church Congress at Leeds was equally remarkable. What a push, to be sure, there was to get into the room where he was to speak! Grave archdeacons in aprons and gaiters, with their womenkind on their arms, were literally fighting to gain admission. A policeman said in my hearing, "Why, it beats Theayter Royal." Party spirit was running very high, and we all felt it a If my friends in the body of the hall would point of honor to cheer our own men, but take no more notice than I do of the sibilant everybody cheered Wilberforce. An old-geese who are giving vent to their natural utterfashioned country parson sat next me, and we were each armed with a ponderous umbrella with which we thumped and thumped the floor till both were smashed; we looked each other in the face and laughed. Then the parson, who had resisted the enthusiasm for the bishop as long as he could, or as consistency demanded, sitting grimly silent, was at last carried away by the general feeling, and he and I rose simultaneously, cheered till we were hoarse, and clapped our hands till they were red and blistered. Then we shook hands and walked home together through the pouring rain, our gamps too far gone to be of any use. His greatest success was achieved at the working-men's meeting. Some one, I think it was Bishop Fraser, hinted that the people present were not working-men. Then a voice shouted for a show of hands. Seventyfive per cent. were lifted up. Then the courtly Wilberforce in episcopal evening dress, with the collar and ornament of the Garter, rose amid deafening applause. There is hardly a family in the land that is. such an out-and-out Yorkshire-blood family as mine is, and there in this town of Leeds, in its Cloth Hall and like places great triumphs were achieved, not only by but also for your representative in this county, which entitled him to stand up and say to one of the greatest interests in England: "You shall give up your inhuman prey; the slave shall be free. Again on the fight for shorter hours of labor, in which he and Shaftesbury stood side by side, how he spoke to them of the real use to be made of their opportu An eye-witness told me that his look of withering contempt combined with the way in which he pronounced the words italicized, especially the s, was marvellous, and silenced the "geese" in a moment. .I was present the first time he preached in Manchester Cathedral, and happened to be alone in the Chapter House when he arrived. So he asked me, "Whom have I got to preach to?" I told him, 66 Before you is the largest assembly of working-men in the north of England, unless in the Parish Church of Leeds; on the left, wealthy merchants and manufac turers; on the right, the boys of Chetham's Hospital." He had a word for all. Is his journal he writes, "Cathedral crowded, four thousand present, collected £150 for S.P.G., which they thought immense." But he does not say how a worthy alderman of the civic type, "and fair round belly with good capon lined," rushed up the Chapter House steps with a cheque for £100 in his hand, saying, "I must see the Bishop of Oxford." And see him he did with the avowal that he had never given a penny to missions before. Five years later when we were all settling in committee who should entertain distinguished visitors to the Church Congress, the alderman pleaded to have the Bishop of Oxford. He might have gone further and fared worse, for the alderman was noted for his good dinners and wines, and for his peaches, which, so I was told, cost him a guinea apiece. On the whole, I think that long-suffering congregations were benefited by the Wil. berforcian imitators; they might "mouth" a little, but they aimed high when they set before themselves such a model, and the higher you aim the better it is for you. Besides which there can be but one Wilberforce in a generation. At that congress he spoke to the working-men at their special meeting. Although it was a very rainy evening, the Free-Trade Hall was crammed. As it often happened, Wilberforce was rather Why a man so eminently fitted for the late, so he tried to make his way to the post was never made Archbishop of York platform unobserved. But no, thank you, can never be satisfactorily accounted for. they got sight of him and rose in a body, Julius Hare always prophesied that he shouting at the top of their voices, "Bish- would go to Canterbury, Dr. Hook openly op of Oxford! Bishop of Oxford!". proclaimed Oxford for Canterbury, and I waving their hats and handkerchiefs over suppose it is an open secret that he was their heads. A local orator was speaking, recommended for the northern primacy and speaking well, but in spite of the by Lord Palmerston. Some say the queen chairman's (Bishop Lee) efforts to get him would not accept him because of the part a continued hearing, the interruptions in- he took in the Hampden controversy, but creased till some one bawled out, "We've no one can tell. I happened to be staying not come to hear thee, S―, we can hear at a mutual friend's, and heard what actuthee any day, mun! We've come to ally did take place. Archbishop Longley hearken to Bishop o' Oxford." Wilber- did write to him to say that he had been force kept his seat till the noise becoming selected. Every one congratulated him; deafening, and the people clamorous, he then by the next post a letter came acrose and begged them to listen to the then quainting him with the real state of the speaker. But no, him they would hear case. "Ah, it is a wicked world," was his and no one else. So he stood up and sole comment. Some one asked him, made a speech showing how thoroughly"Who is Dr. Thomson?" "One of my he knew and understood their trials and former curates." Wilberforce was bitdifficulties. Then, when "the three times terly disappointed. His family traditions, three " the whole assembly rising- his courtly manners, his marvellous tact, were over, he sat down and seemingly his familiarity with society, would have went to sleep. But it must have been a well fitted him to cope with the aristocratic cat's sleep, for when one of the local and somewhat marked exclusiveness of members of Parliament, a large employer Yorkshire nobility and gentry, while his of labor and a munificent founder of other qualities suited the intelligent workchurches and schools, at the request of ing classes. No one, however learned or those present, asked his lordship to sum clever, could make up for the loss, for he up the speeches and discussion, he did it would have given as much life to the dioin such a way as to show that he had not cese and province as he did to his own lost a word, and did not leave a single former sphere at Oxford. point untouched. I do not suppose that there ever was a man with more imitators, some of whom only got hold of his mannerisms. But as T. Mozley says in his "Reminiscences of Oriel: ". Mannerism of any kind, not the less if it be the mannerism of genius and goodness, perpetuates and propagates itself till it becomes an institution. A very marked voice will survive long in a household, in a choir, or even in a small congregation, so that its owner will be heard long after he has departed. All this shows the great and mysterious power of that human voice which is the most perfect of all instruments, the loss by the want of it, and the mischief done by its imperfections. Strange it is that when voice is such a power and has been so in all ages, from the "falling flakes" of Ulysses to this day, it should be so little cultivated. What a power of work he possessed, too! "He could go on working," said Canon Ashwell, "at the top of his power, hour after hour, through the day and the night, and think no wearying trouble about details a hindrance to be put aside." Again and again, throughout his diaries, he appears as attending business meetings in London during the whole morning, then by railway to some church-opening, or school-opening, or stone-laying in his diocese, then by railway to some dinner-party, perhaps in Staffordshire or Gloucestershire, where he would meet some one he desired to see; then, at midnight, go to his room and write replies to his day letters until 2 A.M., and still, at that hour, dash off to some private friend an account of the evening's incidents and conversation, and, as often as not, add a postscript ness. to the epistle in the carriage which next | the sprite in the orthodox form, in nomine, morning conveyed him to an 8 A.M. train etc., etc., to avow his errand. Then the for his return to London, work, and busi- troubled spirit deposed that he had not destroyed a written confession made to Three lady friends of mine were travel-him whilst in the flesh, which had inadverling with him in a carriage on the Great tently been placed between the leaves of Western Line, and hoped to share his an old tome of casuistic theology then and conversation; but after an exchange of there to be found on the shelves of the courtesies, he handed to one the Times, library where the two, one in and the other to another, the Illustrated London News, out of the body, were. The restless sprite to the third, Punch. Now," said he, "I urged his listener at once to destroy this must write my letters," and he wrote on to document, which it need not be said was the end of the journey. Nor could he immediately done. Then the ghost disapeven then escape notice, for as the train peared, and never again disturbed the drew up to a station, he overheard a work- household. ing-man say to one of his chums, "I say, Bill, there's 'Soapy Sam' in the next carriage. I should like him to tell us the road to Heaven." The bishop put his head out of the window. "So, my men, you want to know the way to Heaven. You just take the first turn to the right, and keep straight on." I suppose every body knows that he got that sobriquet from his own initials as founder, and Alfred Potts's as first principal, appearing on either side of a porch at Cuddesdon College. No one, however, saw how the words stood in combination (SOAP), till the bishop's own quick eye detected it. During his great intimacy at court, this name expanded into "Windsor Soap." A child once asked him why he got his nickname. "Because," he replied, "I have so much dirty work to do and I always come out of it with clean hands." His faculty of telling stories was well known, but not, perhaps, the way he could relate ghost stories. To tell these, he would sometimes sit up till one or two in the morning, when the very hair of the heads of his auditors would stand on end, like the quills of the fretful porcupine, vox faucibus hæsit, steteruntque coma. Once or twice he so sat up with the late Rev. Dr. Neale, a firm believer in, and an excellent retailer of, such marvels. Neale told me the following story on the bishop's authority, though I am not sure that he was right in believing that it happened to Wilberforce himself, for, after the witching hour, the imagination may sometimes get the better of the memory. The bishop, or somebody else—we will give the reader the benefit of the doubt was sitting up after midnight in a country house where he was a guest, after the family had retired to rest, when a spectral visitor made his (or its) appearance, in the form of an ecclesiastic, clothed in an antiquated sort of garb. Wilberforce, or whoever it was, adjured Like every one of his poetic temperament, Wilberforce was an ardent admirer of nature. Whenever he went from home, his letters were full of descriptions of the scenery. Nothing escaped him, whether abroad, in Wales, or his own beautiful Sussex. He loved animal life, not simply as a naturalist, but as observing the habits, and dispositions, and instincts of birds and beasts. He liked them as Bishop Thirlwall did, or as Kingsley did, from an Æsopian, rather than from a scientific point of view. He would delight in watching the rare instincts of the rooks, as they set up their strange colonies, and the herons, as they flew backwards and forwards to supply their young. My friend the Rev. C. M. Phelps, one of the most enthusiastic naturalists in south Wales, tells me that while a schoolboy at Tenby in 1854, he was one day searching for shells and crustaceans at low tide near St. Katharine's Rock, when a gentleman, accompanied by two lads, came up and entered into conversation, asking him a good many questions about a certain species of shellfish, and other marine animals. The boy answered as best he could, for he was rather awed by the courtly bearing of the questioner. Two days after, however, he saw the stranger assisting Bishop Thirlwall in the consecration of the new cemetery, and heard him in the evening astonish the natives by a magnificent speech at a S.P.G. meeting. He then found that he had been chatting with the Bishop of Oxford, and that the lads by his side were his two sons, one the present Bishop of Newcastle, the other Canon Wilberforce. Recalling the circumstance, my informant says he should never forget the gossip about Wilberforce as a supposed Puseyite, the suspicion with which they regarded the order of the Garter he wore as a piece of ritualism, nor the contrast between his musical intonation and bright eloquence. and the sonorous utterances of Bishop | asked how it was the angels wanted a lad. Thiriwall, nor the way in which he carried the whole audience with him. His domestic pets loved him as much as his cottagers and laborers did. For it must not be forgotten that he was a country squire, as well as a bishop - the owner of Lavington in Sussex, a property inherited from his wife's family. It is said that he was, at first, not a little put out by the rude manners of the rustics. So as they knew nothing of politeness, he showed them that he did. Accordingly, whenever he met them, he took off his hat to them. Had his courtesy, I wonder, the same effect it had on an occasion when about to walk in procession to the consecration of a cemetery, some roughs determined to oppose his progress? "Gentlemen," said he, politely raising his cap, "I have been requested to ask the protection of an extra guard of constables for myself and my friends here, allow me to place myself and them under your protection." I do not profess to quote the exact words, but the effect was instantaneous. The roughs went with the robed ecclesiastics as a guard of honor, took off their hats, and attended respect. fully to the service. Wilberforce thanked them, and shook hands. He rather plumed himself on remembering faces, and justly so. One day, however, he received a somewhat rude shock. A Hampshire lout, I do not know a better word, appeared in a country church among the candidates. The bishop felt sure he had confirmed him before, so he leant over and said very softly, "My boy, I think I have confirmed you be fore." The lad opened his great wide eyes and replied, "You be a liar." Wilberiorce knew that this was only the ordinary way a clown knew how to deny what was not true. So he was told to kneel down, and he was confirmed. He was engaged in giving away prizes at a middle school where there were master and mistress of unusually high quali fications. A speech was made in which the excellences of the master were duly mentioned but nothing said of the mistress. Some one reminded the speaker of the omission, so with ready tact he said, Every one here knows that homo includes woman. So what I said of the head master is equally applicable to the head mistress." In a village school he was giving a lesson on Jacob's ladder and the angels, and then invited any child present to ask a question, whereupon an ingenuous lad der when they had wings. The questioner was a little nonplussed, but wanting to know what was floating in the children's brains he called up a little chap, and said, "Tommy, can you explain that?" "I suppose," said the urchin, "cos they was a-moultin." A little girl was found after church with her pet dog and cat perched up on a chair, whilst she was solemnly reading her New Testament aloud. "Don't you know?" said she, by way of explanation, "the bishop told us to preach the gospel to every creature. Isn't a dog or a cat a creature?" Some village children were observed by him making mud pies. "Well, my little men," said he, "and what are you doing there." "We're making a church, sir." 'Oh, a church, are you, but where's the parson? "There ain't mud enough to make him, sir,” said an urchin. A parson asked leave to put up a curtain to hide the baldness of the eastward wall of his church, but he feared some aggrieved parishioner might discern a rag of Popery in it. Wilberforce thought the objection absurd, and wrote back: "Dear I'm in a great hurry. Hang the cur tains!" Another parson of no good reputation complained to the bishop that some one had maligned him to the bishop. To this the bishop replied, “Rev. Sir, no one has maligned you." Apparently the sarcasm missed fire, for the parson showed the letter round as a testimony to character. George Cruikshank is the authority for the following story, told to a friend by an elderly clergyman. The guests were playing at rhymes where certain words were given out to be made into couplets. The two words were cassowary and Timbuctoo. They puzzled Cruikshank, who passed them on to Wilberforce. This was his impromptu : If I were a cassowary, On plains of Timbuctoo, Black coat and hymn-book too. Then there is the Blenheim story, about who should drive and who should walk to church. Palmerston and the host passed Wilberforce and his companions walking under their umbrellas, for it had come on to pour with rain. So the premier put his head out of the carriage window, and said, How blest is he who ne'er consents To which Wilberforce responded. Nor stands in sinners' ways, nor sits Where men profanely talk. A propos of the Psalms, the Baroness Burdett Coutts was driving him out towards Colombia Market when something brought up the word drysalter. "Does your lordship know what a drysalter is?" said the lady. Certainly," replied Wilberforce. "Tate & Brady." By the way, he might have been excused if he had not known, for at a ball in Manchester, a young lady who had been introduced to a very eligible partner engaged in that then lucrative business asked a cavalry officer with whom she was dancing, "What is a drysalter?" The soldier pulled his mous tache and said, "A wholesale pickle-merchant, I presume." Wilberforce was once told by his secretary, on the lookout, as is the wont of secretaries, for fees, "Mr. So-and-so must have a license for non-residence, my lord, for there is no parsonage house." Quoth the bishop," He must have nothing of the kind, if there is no house, how can he want a license not to live in it?" He could be good-humoredly sarcastic at times. He had been much bored by some tedious talkers at a clerical meeting, whereupon a friend congratulated him on his patience. "Well, you know," he replied, "one of the duties of a bishop is to suffer fools gladly." by hearing the bells chime. It was in cross country," as the fox-hunters say, and arrived at his destination at a handgallop, to the amazement of the churchwardens who were anxiously looking out for him. I told this to a friend. "Ah," said he, "but what was that to what happened to the Rev. Septimus Hansard? He had promised to preach for Charles Kingsley, whose curate he once was, and missed his train. There was nothing for it but to drive, so Hansard rushed to an inn and called out: Horses here, quick, bring me all the horses you have got.' and good! grooms and ostlers were on the alert, and in a few minutes up drove a coach and four in which the preacher took his place and arrived at Eversley to the infinite amusement of the Hampshire urchins." Well No doubt he had his faults; who has not? but his old friend Dr. Hook, in a thoroughly appreciative article in the Quarterly Review, says very justly : : I met him at Whitby shortly after the passage of arms between him and Lord Westbury. Some time after, the two antagonists met on a not very auspicious occasion, for it was at the entrance of the Those only who were admitted into the House of Lords, just after the chancellor him in private, are qualified to speak of his Bishop's confidence, or at least had often seen had given up the great seal. Lord West- actual character. He had a facility alike in bury remarked, "I felt inclined to say, assuming and in throwing off the burdens of 'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?"" his office and station which might easily misSaid Wilberforce, "I was never so tempt-lead. To see him at his own table for ined in my life to finish the passage, but I kept it down and asked, Does your lordship remember the end of the quotation?"" 66 We lawyers," curtly responded Westbury, are not in the habit of quoting part of a sentence without knowing the whole." "No doubt," says the bishop, "he went home and looked it out in his family Bible, where he would see, 'Yea, I have found thee because thou hast sold thyself to work iniquity." 66 With all his energy and activity he was not the most punctual of mankind, and sometimes kept the services as well as the soup waiting. On his way to a confirmation at High Wycombe as he was riding along, some distance from the town, thinking over what he should say to the candidates, he was startled out of his reverie that stance, surrounded by twenty or thirty guests, He had an . . His |