the separate steps of
it--it may be stops of great immediate interest--our sense of its
connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the
degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand,
falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many
admirers--many who deeply loved and trusted him--many who, in the face
of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on
the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them,
and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had
rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be
both in the Church and the country.

For it is obvious, at the first glance now that he is gone, that there
is no one who can fill the place which he filled. It seems to us beyond
dispute that he has been the greatest Bishop the English Church has
seen for a century and a half. We do not say the greatest man, but the
greatest Bishop; the one among the leaders of the English Church who
most adequately understood the relations of his office, not only to the
Church, but to his times and his country, and who most adequately
fulfilled his own conception of them. We are very far from saying this
because of his exuberant outfit of powers and gifts; because of his
versatility, his sympathetic nature, his eager interest in all that
interested his fellows, his inexhaustible and ready resources of
thought and speech, of strong and practical good sense, of brilliant or
persuasive or pathetic eloquence. In all this he had equals and rivals,
though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his
powers. Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect,
but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at
once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society,
to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to
enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic
congregations. All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and
not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the
surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the
whole. Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges,
disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness--or what was
often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as
unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought. We