ed
to you both for your constantly renewed kindness, but I have
another debt to acknowledge in the invaluable assistance which he
afforded me in the discharge of one among the most important and
most delicate of my duties. This void never can be filled, and it
helps me in some degree to feel what must be the void to you.
Certainly he was happy in the enjoyment of love and honour from
all who knew him; yet these were few in comparison with those whom
he so wisely and so warmly served without their knowing it; and
the love and honour paid him, great as they were, could not be as
great as he deserved. His memory is blessed--may his rest be deep
and sweet, and may the memory and example of him ever help you in
your onward pilgrimage.

The same week Dr. Pusey died--a name that filled so large a space in the
religious history of England for some thirty years of the century. Between
Mr. Gladstone and him the old relations of affectionate friendship
subsisted unbroken, notwithstanding the emancipation, as we may call it,
of the statesman from maxims and principles, though not, so far as I know,
from any of the leading dogmatic beliefs cherished by the divine. "I
hope," he wrote to Phillimore (Sept. 20, 1882), "to attend Dr. Pusey's
funeral to-morrow at Oxford.... I shall have another mournful office to
discharge in attending the funeral of the Dean of Windsor, more mournful
than the first. Dr. Pusey's death is the ingathering of a ripe shock, and
I go to his obsequies in token of deep respect and in memory of much
kindness from him early in my life. But the death of Dean Wellesley is to
my wife and me an unexpected and very heavy blow, also to me an
irreparable loss. I had honoured and loved him from Eton days."

The loss of Dean Wellesley's counsels was especially felt in
ecclesiastical appointments, and the greatest of these was made necessary
by the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of December.
That the prime minister should regard so sage, conciliatory, and
large-minded a steersman as Dr. Tait with esteem was certain, and their
relations were easy and manly. Still, Tait had been an active liberal when
Mr. Gladstone was a tory, and (M37) from the distant days of the _Tracts
for the Times_, when Tait had stood amongst the foremost in open dislike
of the new tenets, their paths in the region of theology lay wide apart.
"I well remember," says Dean Lake, "