lity, his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness
to amuse or be amused, the epithet "harmonious" is abundantly justified.
He cultivates to some extent the airs and tone of the eighteenth
century, in which his studies have chiefly lain. He says what he means,
and calls a spade a spade, and glories in an old-fashioned prejudice. He
is the jolliest of companions and the steadiest of friends, and perhaps
the most genuine book-lover in London, where, as a rule, people are too
"cultured" to read books, though willing enough to chatter about them.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] May 7, 1897.

XVII.

CLERGYMEN.

_ Clerus Anglicanus stupor mundi_. I believe that this complimentary
proverb originally referred to the learning of the English clergy, but
it would apply with equal truth to their social agreeableness. When I
was writing about the Art of Conversation and the men who excelled in
it, I was surprised to find how many of the best sayings that recurred
spontaneously to my memory had a clerical origin; and it struck me that
a not uninteresting chapter might be written about the social
agreeableness of clergymen. A mere layman may well feel a natural and
becoming diffidence in venturing to handle so high a theme.

In a former chapter I said something of the secular magnificence which
surrounded great prelates in the good old days, when the Archbishop of
Canterbury could only be approached on gilt-edged paper, and even the
Bishop of impecunious Oxford never appeared in his Cathedral city
without four horses and two powdered footmen. In a certain sense, no
doubt, these splendid products of established religion conduced to
social agreeableness. Like the excellent prelate described in
_Friendship's Garland_, they "had thoroughly learnt the divine lesson
that charity begins at home." They maintained an abundant hospitality;
they celebrated domestic events by balls at the episcopal palace; they
did not disdain (as we gather from the Life of the Hon. and Rev. George
Spencer) the relaxation of a rubber of whist, even on the night before
an Ordination, with a candidate for a partner. They dined out, like that
well-drawn bishop in _Little Dorrit_, who "was crisp, fresh, cheerful,
affable, bland, but so surprisingly innocent;" or like the prelate on
whom Thackeray moralized: "My Lord, I was pleased to see good thing
after good thing disappear before you; and think that no man ever better
became that rounded episcopal apron. How amiable