busy with the conscience and conduct of the
clergy. Harmless but contumacious priests were under lock and key. It
seemed as if more might follow them, or else as if the shock of the great
tractarian catastrophe of the forties might in some new shape recur. To
recommend an archbishop in times like these could to a churchman be no
light responsibility.

With such thoughts in his mind, however we may judge them, it is not
altogether surprising that in seeking an ecclesiastical governor for an
institution to him the most sacred and beloved of all forms of human
association, Mr. Gladstone should have cared very little whether the
personage best fitted in spirituals was quite of the right shade as to
state temporals. The labour that he now expended on finding the best man
is attested by voluminous correspondence. Dean Church, who was perhaps the
most freely consulted by the prime minister, says, "Of one thing I am
quite certain, that never for hundreds of years has so much honest
disinterested pains been taken to fill the primacy--such inquiry and
trouble resolutely followed out to find the really fittest man, apart from
every personal and political consideration, as in this case."(63)

Another ecclesiastical vacancy that led to volumes of correspondence was
the deanery of Westminster the year before. In the summer of 1881 Dean
Stanley died, and it is interesting to note how easy Mr. Gladstone found
it to do full justice to one for whom as erastian and latitudinarian he
could in opinion have such moderate approval. In offering to the Queen his
"cordial sympathy" for the friend whom she had lost, he told her how early
in his own life and earlier still in the dean's he had opportunities of
watching the development of his powers, for they had both been educated at
a small school near the home of Mr. Gladstone's boyhood.(64) He went on to
speak of Stanley's boundless generosity and brilliant gifts, his genial
and attaching disposition. "There may be," he said, "and must be much
diversity as to parts of the opinions of Dean Stanley, but he will be long
remembered as one who was capable of the deepest and widest love, and who
received it in return."

Far away from these regions of what he irreverently called the shovel hat,
about this time Carlyle died (Feb. 4, 1881), a firm sympathiser with Mr.
Gladstone in his views of the unspeakable Turk, but in all else the rather
boisterous preacher of a gospel directly antipathetic. "Carlyl