ns of his own, he was anxious to hear yours; a ready and eager
talker, yet a willing listener. His oratory was plain, with few
flights of rhetoric, but it was direct and vigorous, free from
conventional phrases, charged with clear good sense and genuine
feeling, and capable, when his feeling was exceptionally strong, of
rising to eloquence. He had a ready sense of humour, the best proof of
which was that he relished a joke against himself.[32] However, the
greatest charm, both of his public and private talk, was the
transparent sincerity and honesty that shone through it. His mind was
like a crystal pool of water in a mountain stream. You saw everything
that was in it, and saw nothing that was mean or unworthy. This
sincerity and freshness made his character not only manly, but lovable
and beautiful, beautiful in its tenderness, its loyalty to his
friends, its devotion to truth.

His conscientious anxiety to say nothing more than he thought was apt
to make him an embarrassing ally. It happened more than once that when
he came to speak at a public meeting on behalf of some enterprise, he
was not content, like most men, to set forth its merits and claims,
but went on to dwell upon possible drawbacks or dangers, so that the
more ardent friends of the scheme thought he was pouring cold water on
them, and called him a Balaam reversed. In a political assembly he
would have been an _enfant terrible_ whom his party would have feared
to put up to speak; but as people in the diocese got to know that this
was his way, they only smiled at his too ingenuous honesty. As he
spoke with no preparation, and was naturally impulsive, he now and
then spoke unadvisedly, and received a good deal of newspaper censure.
But he was never involved in real trouble by these speeches. As Dean
Stanley wrote to him, "You have a singular gift of going to the very
verge of imprudence and yet never crossing it."

No one will wonder that such a character, set in a conspicuous place,
and joined to extraordinary activity and zeal, should have produced an
immense effect on the people of his city and diocese. Since
Nonconformity arose in England in the seventeenth century, no bishop,
perhaps, indeed no man, whether cleric or layman, had done so much to
draw together people of different religious persuasions and help them
to realise their common Christianity. Densely populated South
Lancashire is practically one huge town, and he was its foremost
citizen; the