as forced and weak; and I find Russell is painfully impressed with its untenable character, though in most respects satisfied with his volumes.-MARTINEAU, JAMES, 1863, To Mr. Tayler, Sept. 4; Life and Letters, ed. Drummond, vol. I, p. 404.

We have not seen that, among the halfhundred books and half-thousand pamphlets which it has called out, any new views as to the Pentateuch or the Book of Joshua have been elicited, which we need present at any length to our readers, or with any great care discuss. What is new in Bishop Colenso's own suggestions of detail is perhaps curious, but it seems to us certainly trivial. The greater part of his suggestions are not new, as he himself says. They are household words to every intelligent Christian in America, in France, or in Germany. We believe we might add, they are the familiar speculations of all the enlightened men not bound by the strictest ties of the Church in Spain, in Italy, and in Russia. England is the only country in Christendom where at this moment, the promulgation of these views could be welcomed with such a howl of indignation and surprise. . . . The handful of illustrations which Bishop Colenso presents, where he might have presented thousands, are painfully and sedulously discussed, as if the whole case were wrapped up in them. Eyerything in the controversy shows to us, that to the great majority of the English clergy, of the higher orders as well as of the lower, the discovery that the Pentateuch is self-contradictory, or that any statement in it is untenable, is not simply painful, but a surprise.-HALE, EDWARD EVERETT, 1863, The Colenso Controversy, Christian Examiner, vol. 75, pp. 99, 103.

If the Bishop desired a sudden immortality, he has secured his wish. If he sought to put his thoughts in such a form that those for whom he wrote might thoughtlessly receive his opinion as law with regard to the gravest questions that have ever commanded the attention of man, he has been successful. There is a baldness and a boldness in the style of his book, a lowness and, if we may use the term, a filthiness of mind, as if gorging himself with details bordering upon obscenity, which caters to a class of readers who are ever too eager to catch at anything which may foster and strengthen their prejudices against the stern and pure spirit of revela

tion. Sometimes, as we have read page after page, it seemed as if we could see in the eye of the consecrated Bishop the leer of the Arch-deceiver himself, as looking up at us he said, "Yea! hath God said this?"

It was begotten like a house-plant. It will die like a mushroom.-STEARNS, O. S.,

1863, Bishop Colenso, The Christian Review, vol. 28, pp. 466, 479.

Literary criticism, however, must not blame the Bishop of Natal because his personal position is false, nor praise Spinoza because his personal position is sound. But, as it must deny to the Bishop's book the right of existing, when it can justify its existence neither by edifying the many nor informing the few, it must concede that right to Spinoza's for the sake of its unquestionably philosophic scope. . . . There are alleged contradictions in Scripture; and the question which the general culture of Europe, informed of this, asks with real interest is, as I have said,-What then? To this question Spinoza returns an answer, and the Bishop of Natal returns none. The Bishop of Natal keeps going round forever within the barren sphere of these contradictions themselves; he treats them as if they were supremely interesting in themselves, as if we had never heard of them before, and could never hear enough of them now. Spinoza touches these verbal matters with all possible brevity, and presses on to the more important. It is enough for him to give us what is indispensably necessary of them. . . . He, too, like the Bishop of Natal, touches on the family of Judah; but he devotes one page to this topic, and the Bishop of Natal devotes thirteen. To the sums in Ezra-with which the Bishop of Natal, "should God, in His providence, call him to continue the work," will assuredly fill folios -Spinoza devotes barely a page. He is anxious to escape from the region of these verbal matters, which to the Bishop of Natal are a sort of intellectual land of Beulah.-ARNOLD, MATTHEW, 1863, The Bishop and the Philosopher, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 7, pp. 252, 253.

So sincere is my dislike to all personal attack and controversy, that I abstain from reprinting, at this distance of time from the occasion which called them forth, the essays in which I criticised the Bishop of Natal's book; I feel bound, however, after all that has passed, to make here a final declaration of my sincere impenitence for having

published them. The Bishop of Natal's subsequent volumes are in great measure free from the crying fault of his first; he has at length succeeded in more clearly separating, in his own thoughts, the idea of science from the idea of religion; his mind appears to be opening as he goes along, and he may perhaps end by becoming a useful biblical critic, though never, I think, of the first order. Still, in here taking leave of him at the moment when he is publishing, for popular use, a cheap edition of his work, I cannot forbear repeating yet once more, for his benefit and that of his readers, this sentence from my original remarks upon him: There is truth of science and truth of religion; truth of science does not become truth of religion till it is made religious. And I will add: Let us have all the science there

is from the men of science; from the men of religion let us have religion.-ARNOLD, MATTHEW, 1865, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, Essays in Criticism, p. 26, note.

There are two Bishops, and two only, among all the Bishops of the Colonial Churches, who won for themselves the glory of having endeavored to translate the truths of the Scriptures into the uncouth tongues of the people whose pastors they have become. The one is Bishop Patteson of Melanesia, and the other is Bishop Colenso of Natal. If, in pursuance of this investigation, he was led to take too minute care of the words and letters of the Sacred Volume, as I fully think he was, still one would have thought that the sacredness and the value of the labour in which he was employed ought to have procured for him something different from the vast vocabulary of abuse which, as a general rule, is the only response his labours have met with in this country.-STANLEY, ARTHUR PENRHYN, 1865-67, The South African Controversy, Essays Chiefly on Church and State, p.

313.

He has recently published a volume of the sermons he has preached since his return to his bishopric, sermons in which many of the theological questions of the day are dealt with in an able and thoroughly original manner. But the peculiar merit of these discourses is one above their learning and originality. It consists in that warm and simple piety, that strong, clear faith in the LIVING GOD, which has been from first to last the characteristic of the man

whom his enemies proclaim as the most dangerous infidel of the day. Well will it be for England, if, fifty years or a century hence, her clergy, with all their cowardly tampering with truth, have left in the hearts of the masses of her people such real manly faith, faith in God and duty and immortality, as breathes through every word and deed of the heretic Bishop of Natal. COBBE, FRANCES POWER, 1867, Bishop Colenso, Christian Examiner, vol. 83, p. 15.

I return the Bishop's paper. If I formed my opinion of Colenso from such statemate of his knowledge and powers of reasonments alone, I should have but a low estiing. They are, in my judgment, puerile, hardly ingenius, hardly ingenuous. He does not seem to me to understand the bear

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ing and importance of the subject. But I do not judge Colenso on such grounds. I honour him as a bold, honest, single-minded man, with a deep and sincere love of truth. He is a man, too, of remarkably acute intellect and indefatigable industry. But he entered on these enquiries late in life, struck boldly into one track, in which he marches with fearless intrepidity, looking neither to the right nor to the left. over, he wants wide and general knowledge. He rides his hobby with consummate skill, but he rides it to death. Everything must give way before his Jehovistic and Elohistic theory. Now, I fully believe that to a certain limit, but not in its application to all the writings of the Old Testament (as we have them); for I am a worse sceptic than Colenso, doubting whether we have them in unaltered, unimpeachable integrity. I believe the whole of Colenso's theory about the development of the Jewish religion to be all pure conjecture and from (to me) most unsatisfactory premises. As history, much of the German criticism, as well as his, is purely arbitrary: doubtful conclusions from more doubtful facts. None of this, however, in the least lowers my respect for Colenso, and my sense of his ill usage by persons to whom his knowledge is comparatively the widest, his ignorance much more trustworthy than their knowledge. As for his piety, I have read some, and intend to read more of his sermons. None of his adversaries, of course, read them. If they did, it might put even them to shame, especially as contrasted with their cold, dry dogmatism.-MILMAN, HENRY

objects. Those charities are still continued out of her funds, and through the influence of her example. God drew her nearer to Him by five months of acute suffering. She bore her agonies (from cancer of the liver) with meek resignation, and sorrow for me, who was to lose her, but none for herself. ... My grief for her is selfish. You know what I have lost-a peerless creature, wise, just, and full of genius, yet devoted to me. She alone sustained me in the hard battle of my life, and now, old and broken, I must totter on without her, sick, sad, and lonely. My remorse is for this. I had lived entirely for the world, and so disquieted her with my cares, instead of leading her on the path of peace, and robbed God of a saint, though not of a believer.-READE, CHARLES, 1880, Letter to Joseph Hatton, June 14; Memoir of Charles Reade, ed. Reade and Reade, pp. 445, 446.

In his undergraduate days the future novelist seems to have been rather Byronic. A tall graceful youngster, with a splendidlyproportioned figure and muscles to match, he attracted attention by his long flowing curls. Abhorring alcohol in every form as well as tobacco, he did not assimilate largely with his junior common-room, though he was far from unpopular. He read-in his own fashion-and at the age of twenty-one figured in the third class, and was at once elected fellow. His fellowship rendered him independent, and for the best part of twenty years he lived a life of incessant action, mostly in the open air. Nevertheless, unlike Lord Beaconsfield's fine young English gentleman, he was devoted to books, and in effect was storing up material which afterwards enabled him to construct situations, not only stagey but real. At the time the man was very much a Guy Livingstone. He was a dead shot; he knocked Alfred Mynn round the field at Liverpool; he excelled as an archer and as a pedestrian; few if any could beat him in throwing a castnet, and among other accomplishments he reckoned theatrical dancing. READE, COMPTON, 1884, Charles Reade, Contemporary Review, vol. 45, p. 709.

My acquaintance with him did not begin till his infirmity of deafness had grown to be a source of much inconvenience to him; but it certainly had not the effect, often attributed to it, of making him impatient or morose. His hollowed hand, and smiling, attentive face are always present in the

picture which my memory draws of him. He expressed himself very strongly upon matters in which his feelings were moved, but they were always moved in the right direction, and though, when contending with an adversary on paper, he did not use the feather end of his pen, his heart was as soft as a woman's. He was never moved by those petty jealousies which (with little reason, so far as my experience goes) are attributed to his craft, and the last time he spoke to me on literary subjects was in praise of one who might well have been considered a rival-Wilkie Collins.-PAYN, JAMES, 1884, Some Literary Recollections, p. 164.

It was in the summer of 1876 that I first made the acquaintance of Charles Reade, at a little dinner given by Mr. John Coleman, then manager of the Queen's Theatre.

Pleasant beyond measure was that night's meeting; pleasanter still the friendly intimacy which followed, and lasted for years; for all the many distinguished men that I have met, Charles Reade, when you knew him thoroughly, was one of the gentlest, sincerest, and most sympathetic. With the intellectual strength and bodily height of an Anak, he possessed the quiddit and animal spirits of Tom Thumb. He was learned, but wore his wisdom lightly, as became a true English gentleman of the old school. His manners had the stateliness of the last generation, such manners as I had known in the scholar Peacock, himself a prince of taletellers; and, to women especially, he had the grace and gallantry of the good old band of literary knights. with all his courtly dignity he was as frankhearted as a boy, and utterly without pretence. What struck me at once in him was his supreme veracity. Above all shams and pretences, he talked only of what he knew; and his knowledge, though limited in range, was large and memorable. . . . A magnificent whist and chess player, he would condescend to spend whole evenings at the primitive game of "squales." In these and all other respects, he was the least bookish, the least literary person that ever used a pen.-BUCHANAN, ROBERT, 1884, Recollections, of Charles Reade, Pall Mall

Gazette.

Yet

My first interview with the eminent author, in 1863, left upon me an impression of breadth and amplitude which, though in a measure due to accident and artificial circumstances, remained undisturbed through