a conversation with Mr. Gladstone on
Tait's appointment to London in 1856, when he was much annoyed at Tait's
being preferred to Bishop Wilberforce, and of which he reminded me nearly
thirty years afterwards, at the time of the archbishop's death, by saying,
'Ah! I remember you maintaining to me at that time that his {~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} and
his judgment would make him a great bishop.' "(60) And so, from the point
of ecclesiastical statesmanship, he unquestionably was.

The recommendation of a successor in the historic see of Canterbury, we
may be very certain, was no common event to Mr. Gladstone. Tait on his
deathbed had given his opinion that Dr. Harold Browne, the Bishop of
Winchester, would do more than any other man to keep the peace of the
church. The Queen was strong in the same sense, thinking that the bishop
might resign in a year or two, if he could not do the work. He was now
seventy-one years old, and Mr. Gladstone judged this to be too advanced an
age for the metropolitan throne. He was himself now seventy-three, and
though his sense of humour was not always of the protective kind, he felt
the necessity of some explanatory reason, and with him to seek a plea was
to find one. He wrote to the Bishop of Winchester:--

... It may seem strange that I, who in my own person exhibit so
conspicuously the anomaly of a disparate conjunction between years
and duties, should be thus forward in interpreting the
circumstances of another case certainly more mitigated in many
respects, yet differing from my own case in one vital point, the
newness of the duties of the English, or rather anglican or
British, primacy to a diocesan bishop, however able and
experienced, and the newness of mental attitude and action, which
they would require. Among the materials of judgment in such an
instance, it seems right to reckon precedents for what they are
worth; and I cannot find that from the time of Archbishop Sheldon
any one has assumed the primacy at so great an age as seventy.
Juxon, the predecessor of Sheldon, was much older; but his case
was altogether peculiar. I cannot say how pleasant it would have
been to me personally, but for the barrier I have named, to