usiastic patroness used to entertain Sir Henry Irving when the
public labours of the Lyceum were ended for the night.

Canon Malcolm MacColl is an abbe with a difference. No one eats his
dinner more sociably or tells a story more aptly; no one enjoys good
society more keenly or is more appreciated in it; but he does not make
society a profession. He is conscientiously devoted to the duties of his
canonry; he is an accomplished theologian; and he is perhaps the most
expert and vigorous pamphleteer in England. The Franco-German War, the
Athanasian Creed, the Ritualistic prosecutions, the case for Home Rule,
and the misdeeds of the Sultan have in turn produced from his pen
pamphlets which have rushed into huge circulations and swollen to the
dimensions of solid treatises. Canon MacColl is genuinely and _ex animo_
an ecclesiastic; but he is a politician as well. His inflexible
integrity and fine sense of honour have enabled him to play, with credit
to himself and advantage to the public, the rather risky part of the
Priest in Politics. He has been trusted alike by Lord Salisbury and by
Mr. Gladstone; has conducted negotiations of great pith and moment; and
has been behind the scenes of some historic performances. Yet he has
never made an enemy, nor betrayed a secret, nor lowered the honour of
his sacred calling.

Miss Mabel Collins, in her vivid story of _The Star Sapphire_, has drawn
under a very thin pseudonym a striking portrait of a clergyman who, with
his environment, plays a considerable part in the social agreeableness
of London at the present moment. Is social agreeableness a hereditary
gift? Nowadays, when everything, good or bad, is referred to heredity,
one is inclined to say that it must be; and, though no training could
supply the gift where Nature had withheld it, yet a judicious education
can develop a social faculty which ancestry has transmitted. It is
recorded, I think, of Madame de Stael, that, after her first
conversation with William Wilberforce, she said: "I have always heard
that Mr. Wilberforce was the most religious man in England, but I did
not know that he was also the wittiest." The agreeableness of the great
philanthropist's son--Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and of
Winchester--I discussed in my last chapter. We may put aside the fulsome
dithyrambics of grateful archdeacons and promoted chaplains, and be
content to rest the Bishop's reputation for agreeableness on testimony
so little int