t had been earlier in life. There were
no distinctively clerical lines in the face, no tricks of starchiness
or of affected ease: in his Inverness cape he could not have been
identified except as a gentleman with handsome dark features, a nose
which began with an intention to be aquiline but suddenly became
straight, and iron-gray, hair. Perhaps he owed this freedom from the
sort of professional make-up which penetrates skin, tones and gestures
and defies all drapery, to the fact that he had once been Captain
Gaskin, having taken orders and a diphthong but shortly before his
engagement to Miss Armyn. If any one had objected that his preparation
for the clerical function was inadequate, his friends might have asked
who made a better figure in it, who preached better or had more
authority in his parish? He had a native gift for administration, being
tolerant both of opinions and conduct, because he felt himself able to
overrule them, and was free from the irritations of conscious
feebleness. He smiled pleasantly at the foible of a taste which he did
not share--at floriculture or antiquarianism for example, which were
much in vogue among his fellow-clergyman in the diocese: for himself,
he preferred following the history of a campaign, or divining from his
knowledge of Nesselrode's motives what would have been his conduct if
our cabinet had taken a different course. Mr. Gascoigne's tone of
thinking after some long-quieted fluctuations had become ecclesiastical
rather than theological; not the modern Anglican, but what he would
have called sound English, free from nonsense; such as became a man who
looked at a national religion by daylight, and saw it in its relation
to other things. No clerical magistrate had greater weight at sessions,
or less of mischievous impracticableness in relation to worldly
affairs. Indeed, the worst imputation thrown out against him was
worldliness: it could not be proved that he forsook the less fortunate,
but it was not to be denied that the friendships he cultivated were of
a kind likely to be useful to the father of six sons and two daughters;
and bitter observers--for in Wessex, say ten years ago, there were
persons whose bitterness may now seem incredible--remarked that the
color of his opinions had changed in consistency with this principle of
action. But cheerful, successful worldliness has a false air of being
more selfish than the acrid, unsuccessful kind, whose secret history is
summed