oot of Durham, profound
scholars; some, like Dr. Temple of Exeter, able and earnest
administrators. There remained but few who had not some good claim to
the dignity they enjoyed. So it may be said, when one compares the
later Victorian bishops with their Georgian predecessors, that no
class in the country has improved more. Few now sneer at them, for no
set of men take a more active and more creditable part in the public
business of the country. Their incomes, curtailed of late years in the
case of the richer sees, are no more than sufficient for the expenses
which fall upon them, and they work as hard as any other men for their
salaries. Though the larger sees have been divided, the reduction of
the toil of bishops thus effected has been less than the addition to
it due to the growth of population and the increased activity of the
clergy. The only defect which the censorious still impute to them is a
certain episcopal conventionality, a disposition to try to please
everybody by the use of vague professional language, a tendency to
think too much about the Church as a church establishment, and to
defer to clerical opinion when they ought to speak and act with an
independence born of their individual opinions. Some of them, as, for
instance, the three I have just mentioned, were not open to this
reproach. It was one of the merits and charms of Fraser that he was
absolutely free from any such tendency. Other men, such as Bishop
Lightfoot, have been not less eminent models of the virtues which
ought to characterise a great Christian pastor; but Fraser (appointed
some time before Lightfoot) was the first to be an absolutely
unconventional and, so to speak, unepiscopal bishop. His career marked
a new departure and set a new example.

Fraser spent the earlier years of his manhood in Oxford, as a tutor in
Oriel College, teaching Thucydides and Aristotle. Like many of his
Oxford contemporaries, he continued through life to think on
Aristotelian lines, and one could trace them in his sermons. He then
took in succession two college livings, both in quiet nooks in the
South of England, and discharged for nearly twenty years the simple
duties of a parish priest, unknown to the great world, but making
himself beloved by the people, and doing his best to improve their
condition. The zeal he had shown in promoting elementary education
caused him to be appointed (in 1865) by the Schools Inquiry
Commissioners to be their Assistant Com