ppreciated by those who now peruse them, not only because they were
composed for a given audience with special reference to the
circumstances of the time, but also because the best of them gained so
much by his impassioned delivery. They were all read from manuscript,
and his handwriting was so illegible that it was a marvel how he
contrived to read them. I once asked him, not long after he had been
promoted to the Deanery of Westminster, whether he found it easy to
make himself heard in the enormous nave of the Abbey church. His
frame, it ought to be stated, was spare as well as small, and his
voice not powerful. He answered: "That depends on whether I am
interested in what I am saying. If the sermon is on something which
interests me deeply I can fill the nave; otherwise I cannot." When he
had got a worthy theme, or one which stimulated his own emotions, the
power of his voice and manner was wonderful. His tiny body seemed to
swell, his chest vibrated as he launched forth glowing words. The
farewell sermon he delivered when quitting Oxford for Westminster
lives in the memory of those who heard it as a performance of
extraordinary power, the power springing from the intensity of his own
feeling. No sermon has ever since so moved the University.

He was by nature shy and almost timid, and he was not supposed to
possess any gift for extempore speaking. But when in his later days he
found himself an almost solitary champion in Convocation of the
principles of universal toleration and comprehension which he held, he
developed a debating power which surprised himself as well as his
friends. It was to him a matter of honour and conscience to defend his
principles, and to defend them all the more zealously because he
stood alone on their behalf in a hostile assembly. His courage was
equal to the occasion, and his faculties responded to the call his
courage made.

In civil politics he was all his life a Liberal, belonging by birth to
the Whig aristocracy, and disposed on most matters to take rather the
Whiggish than the Radical view, yet drawn by the warmth of his
sympathy towards the working classes, and popular with them. One of
his chief pleasures was to lead parties of humble visitors round the
Abbey on public holidays. Like most members of the Whig families, he
had no great liking for Mr. Gladstone, not so much, perhaps, on
political grounds as because he distrusted the High Churchism and
anti-Erastianism of the Liberal