The Tracts on Baptism were a thing per se. They were written to save a Hebrew pupil from leaving the Church because it taught the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. I asked him to wait until I could put together the Scriptural evidence for it. In the course of it I wrote on Heb. vi. 4, et seq.

The letter reached me a day or two after my arrival at Llandudno. I replied that here I was in Wales for my wife's health, my first visit to the principality, and away from my books, meaning chiefly my copy of the tracts. I could only beg for time, promising to reply at length immediately on my return home. I did this with a sad misgiving that I had little right to be sure we should either of us be living a month thence. I received the following very kind reply:

I

MY DEAR MOZLEY,—I am sorry to hear of your wife's illness. Do not trouble yourself about my sermon. I am satisfied that it was never printed. Probably I never heard that it was talked about. I have nothing to complain of in your statement. Indeed, I do not see the difference between your statement and what you say was mine. The defect of the sermon as you have reported of it would have been its omissions. I can hardly think that I said nothing to comfort those who were so stricken. Perhaps I shall find the sermon. only wanted it for my own information. At a later period, I was blamed in the opposite direction for accepting and pressing S. Gregory's commentary on 'The first shall be last, and the last first,' as involving that some who have gone much out of the way would, through their subsequent repentance and use of the grace of God, be higher than some who had been all along in it. But it matters little what one thought those many years ago, unless it becomes necessary to explain what one holds now. One can only hope that God stirred up some hearts then (as He, by your account, did yours), and that one's imperfections did not mar the work.

Would that we were not so wide apart. I do not think that

you can understand that great stirring of mind; but the question is not about the past, but the present and the Hereafter.-With every good wish,

Aug. 7, 1882.

Yours very faithfully,

E. B. PUSEY.

On my return home I immediately wrote to Pusey in reply to his three first questions. On referring to the tracts containing Scriptural views on Holy Baptism, and particularly to the preface, I found it to be as Pusey stated. At the time referred to he was writing these tracts, and having to preach before the University he spoke on the matter that his heart was full of. Samuel Wilberforce's sudden appearance at Oxford soon after the delivery of the sermon, and his visit to Newman's rooms and my own, as, too, his public protest soon after, must rest on my recollections. There is nothing either for or against them in the published 'Life.'

WITH regard to two of the most remarkable of my contemporaries I have enjoyed a singular good fortune, indeed, as I feel it, a providential protection. Those two are Mr. Gladstone and Archbishop Tait. It has been my fate, or my folly, to differ from them both considerably-I think always more or less. I have always been at heart too much of a Tory for the one, and too High Church for the other. They have both

gone heartily with the country, but I have been only the humble servant of my country and a reformer rather against the grain. Broad Church' has been to me all my life simply an abomination—that is, Broad Church as enunciated by its foremost advocates.

This led me to a strange complication of feelings with regard to the late Dean Stanley. While I was always fascinated by his style—I could not help reading, generally twice over, every scrap of his I saw in the papers-I recoiled utterly from what I believed to be his doctrine.

As for Mr. Gladstone, I for many years have seldom thought of him and his measures without being reminded of the terrible lines in which Horace describes one of the attendants of that fickle goddess whom he believed to be the arbiter of civil strife:

Te semper anteit serva necessitas,
Clavos trabales et cuneos manu

Gestans ahena; nec severus

Uncus abest liquidumque plumbum.

Often have I felt that I would rather grow cabbages like Cincinnatus, than be the public executioner of usurpations, monopolies, and other abuses. But after indulging in the sentiment I have swelled the triumph of justice, peace, and public good. I have generally been so unfortunate in the use of my electoral privileges that I have come to think them hardly worth the fuss made about them; but the most unfortunate use I ever made of them-so I felt at the time was when I went up to Oxford to vote for Mr. Gladstone, and he was actually elected.

It was some excuse for this ridiculous inconsist

GLADSTONE AND TAIT.

25

ency that I scarcely ever looked into Mr. Gladstone's weekly organ-of course he hadn't a weekly organ in any other sense than he had a tail to his coatwithout seeing some very offensive and utterly untrue allusion to myself. No philosophy, no known species of Christianity, can prevent a little, just a little annoyance under such circumstances.

But now, what is the singular good fortune or providential protection I began with? Simply this: I never in all my life once saw Mr. Gladstone from the evening I met him in Hurdis Lushington's room, three or four days after his arrival from Eton, till he was so good as to ask me to breakfast in June 1882, and kindly suggest a correction or two in my book. On the former occasion he had all the purple bloom and freshness of boyhood, and the glow of generous emotion. Since that day I have seen portraits and caricatures of him a thousand times, but the original idea has never failed to return to the memory.

He

My life's experience of Archbishop Tait has been much the same. I met him, several years my junior, in Oriel Common Room, and perhaps once or twice in the streets of Oxford about the same time. was then a good-natured, chubby-faced, unmistakably Scotch lad, perhaps canny beyond his years. I never saw him again till very recently, at a meeting in the rooms of the National Society for the foundation of a college in memory of Bishop Selwyn. As the leader of the Four Tutors,' and on other occasions, he could not but give pain to Newman's friends and adherents. Nor could he fail to incur the charge of partiality when in after years, and invested with

official authority, he seemed not to shew the like alacrity in reproving excesses in an opposite direction.

Nevertheless, he never lost to me his youthful form, and as I have thought of these two men I have often been reminded of the two beautiful angelic, or rather cherubic, faces looking upwards from the foreground of Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto.

It is needless to say that the development into the existing statesman, as formed by half a century of incessant political warfare, is simply ludicrous, and I could not say that I find in this case the child to be father of the man. But it was so in the case of the late Primate. He was the fair, ingenuous boy to the last as far as looks are concerned, and those looks could not fail to speak the truth. To me the two recollections have been the source of as much pleasure as some childhood memories of a more sentimental character.

It has often occurred to me how much schoolboys owe, in after life, to the sweet and vivacious company of ever-youthful faces still crowding their memories, surrounding them wherever they move, and flitting across their sight night and day. Still, I always felt something owing to myself and to my Oxford friends in the part which the former Tutor of Balliol had taken; and this sense, after much deliberation, I expressed in what may seem a very puny form. Some years ago I recognised on my chancel-screen at Plymtree the rough portraiture of Henry VII., Prince Arthur, and Cardinal Morton. These I got reproduced, with an account of Morton, chiefly from