and a power of
sympathy that enabled him to appreciate even those whose principles
and policy he disliked. Herein he was not singular, for the
sympathetic style of writing history has become fashionable among
us. What was remarkable in him was that his sympathy did not
betray him into the error, now also fashionable, of extenuating moral
distinctions. His charity never blunted the edge of his justice, nor
prevented him from reprobating the faults of the personages who had
touched his heart. For one sin only he had little historical
tolerance--the sin of intolerance. So there was one sin only which
ever led him to speak severely of any of his contemporaries--the
sin of untruthfulness. Being himself so simple and straightforward as
to feel his inability to cope with deceitful men, deceit incensed
him. But he did not resent the violence of his adversaries, for
though he suffered much at their hands he knew many of them to be
earnest, unselfish, and conscientious men.

His pictures of historical scenes are admirable, for with his interest
in the study of character there went a large measure of dramatic
power. Nothing can be better in its way than the description of the
murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury given in the _Memorials of
Canterbury_, which, after _Sinai and Palestine_ and the _Life of
Arnold_, may be deemed the best of Stanley's books. Whether he could,
with more leisure for careful thought and study, have become a
great historian, was a question which those of us who were dazzled
by his Public Lectures at Oxford used often to discuss. The leisure
never came, for he was throughout life warmly interested in every
current ecclesiastical question, and ready to bear a part in
discussing it, either in the press--for he wrote in the _Edinburgh
Review_, and often sent letters to the _Times_ under the signature of
"Anglicanus"--or in Convocation, where he had a seat during the
latter part of his career. These interruptions not only checked the
progress of his studies, but gave to his compositions an air of
haste, which made them seem to want system and finish. The habit
of rapid writing for magazines or other ephemeral purposes is alleged
to tell injuriously upon literary men: it told the more upon
Stanley because he was also compelled to produce sermons rapidly.
Now sermon-writing, while it breeds a tendency to the making of
rhetorical points, subordinates the habit of dispassionate inquiry to
the enforcement of a mora