e reader. Puerile puns, personal banter of a rather homely type, and
good stories collected from other people are all that the books
disclose. Animal spirits did the rest; and yet, by the concurrent
testimony of nearly all who knew him, Bishop Wilberforce was not only
one of the most agreeable but one of the most amusing men of his time.
We know from one of his own letters that he peculiarly disliked the
description which Lord Beaconsfield gave of him in _Lothair_, and on the
principle of _Ce n'est que la verite qui blesse_, it may be worth while
to recall it: "The Bishop was particularly playful on the morrow at
breakfast. Though his face beamed with Christian kindness, there was a
twinkle in his eye which seemed not entirely superior to mundane
self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic
raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from
the daughters of the house, who laughed occasionally even before his
angelic jokes were well launched."

Mr. Bright once said, with characteristic downrightness, "If I was paid
what a bishop is paid for doing what a bishop does, I should find
abundant cause for merriment in the credulity of my countrymen;" and,
waiving the theological animus which the saying implies, it is not
uncharitable to surmise that a general sense of prosperity and a strong
faculty of enjoying life in all its aspects and phases had much to do
with Bishop Wilberforce's exuberant and infectious jollity. "A truly
emotional spirit," wrote Matthew Arnold, after meeting him in a country
house, "he undoubtedly has beneath his outside of society-haunting and
men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest
for the other."

A scarcely less prominent figure in society than Bishop Wilberforce, and
to many people a much more attractive one, was Dean Stanley. A clergyman
to whom the Queen signed herself "Ever yours affectionately" must
certainly be regarded as the social head of his profession, and every
circumstance of Stanley's nature and antecedents exactly fitted him for
the part. He was in truth a spoiled child of fortune, in a sense more
refined and spiritual than the phrase generally conveys. He was born of
famous ancestry, in a bright and unworldly home; early filled with the
moral and intellectual enthusiasms of Rugby in its best days; steeped in
the characteristic culture of Oxford, and advanced by easy stages of
well-deserved promotion to the