se, but
more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of an inquisitive yet
censorious society.

If, on the other hand, expurgation is freely employed, the result is a
kind of emasculation. Nothing is left that can offend or annoy living
people, or that might damage the writer's own reputation with an
audience that enjoys, yet condemns, unmeasured confidences. And so we
get clever, sensible letters of men who have travelled, worked, and
mixed much in society, who have already put into essays or reviews all
that they wanted the public to know, and whose private doubts, or
follies, or frolics, have been neatly removed from their
correspondence. Let us take, for example, two batches of letters very
lately published, and written by two men who have left their mark upon
their generation. Of Dean Stanley it may be affirmed that no
ecclesiastic of his time was better known, or had a higher reputation
for strength of character and undaunted Liberalism. His public life
and his place in the Anglican Church had been already described in a
meritorious biography; and it might have been expected that these
letters would bring the reader closer to the man himself, would
accentuate the points of a striking individuality. There are few of
these letters, we think, by which such expectations have been
fulfilled to any appreciable degree. In one or two of them Stanley
writes with his genuine sincerity and earnestness on the state of his
mind in regard to the new spirit of ecclesiasticism that had arisen in
Oxford nearly sixty years ago; we see that he saw and felt the
magnitude of a coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the
opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his
career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature--and he never
lost his trust in reason--was against the high Roman or sacerdotal
absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and
he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government
which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he
discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement that was bringing
about a Roman Catholic revival.

'Not that I am turned or turning Newmanist, but that I do feel that
the crisis in my opinions is coming on, and that the difficulties I
find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and
that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent
system sh