. As a politician he is already beginning to
be forgotten; but as a judge he will be held in honourable remembrance
as one of the five or six most brilliant luminaries that have
adorned the English bench since those remote days[29] in which the
beginning of legal memory is placed.

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[28] No biography of Lord Cairns has (so far as I know) appeared--a
singular fact, considering the brilliancy of his career, and
considering the tendency which now prevails to bestow this kind
of honour on many persons of the second or even the third rank.
One reason may be that Cairns, great though he was, never won
personal popularity even with his own political party or among
his contemporaries at the bar, and was to the general public no
more than a famous name.

[29] The reign of King Richard the First.

BISHOP FRASER

James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester from 1870 till 1885, was born in
Gloucestershire, of a Scottish family, in 1818, and died at Manchester
in 1885.[30] He took no prominent part in ecclesiastical politics, and
no part at all in general politics. Though a sound classical scholar
in the old-fashioned sense of the term--he won the Ireland University
Scholarship at Oxford, then and still the most conspicuous prize in
the field of classics--he was not an exceptionally cultivated man, and
he never wrote anything except official reports and episcopal charges.
Neither was he, although a ready and effective speaker, gifted with
the highest kind of eloquence. Neither was he a profound theologian.
Yet his character and career are of permanent interest, for he created
not merely a new episcopal type, but (one may almost say) a new
ecclesiastical type within the Church of England.

Till some sixty or seventy years ago the normal English bishop was a
rich, dignified, and rather easy-going magnate, aristocratic in his
tastes and habits, moderate in his theology, sometimes to the verge of
indifferentism, quite as much a man of the world as a pastor of souls.
He had usually obtained his preferment by his family connections, or
by some service rendered to the court or a political chief--perhaps
even by solicitation or intrigue. Now and then eminence in learning or
literature raised a man to the bench: there were, for instance, the
"Greek play" bishops, such as Dr. Monk of Gloucester, whose fame
rested on their editions of the Attic dramatists; and the _Quarterly
Rev