-for even you are not far behind-and I hope we shall not "break the pitcher at the fountain." I wonder at your activity and endurance of weather. May every blessing be with you both to the end!

On the same occasion Mr. Gladstone said, "It would not be possible to unfold in words the value of the gifts which the bounty of Providence has conferred upon me, however unworthy I may be, through her." And in his will he wrote, "I desire to be buried where my wife can also lie." It was the tribute of a grateful love nobly earned and richly given. Mr. Gladstone's political career awaits the verdict of history; but, wherever he is remembered, there will also be remembrance of that pure and courageous spirit which was the guiding-star of his fortunes and the Good Angel of his house.

A

THERE

BISHOP WESTCOTT 1

HERE will be plenty of panegyrists to describe Dr. Westcott as critic and author, Professor and Bishop. Comparatively few people remember him as schoolmaster. I look back over three-and-thirty years, and recall him as I first knew him at Harrow, with his "puny body," anxious forehead, and faint voice, one of the few noticeable and interesting figures in a professional society dominated by convention and commonplace. The great majority of our masters I think we honestly contemned, or at best regarded with a good-humoured tolerance. But there was a kind of mystery about Westcott which was distinctly impressive. He was hardly visible in the common life of the School. He lived remote, aloof, apart, above. It must be presumed that the boys who boarded in his House knew something of him, but with the School in general he never came in contact. His special work was to supervise the composition, English and classical, of the Sixth Form ; and on this task he lavished all his minute and scrupulous scholarship, all his genuine enthusiasm for literary beauty. But, till we reached the Sixth, we saw Westcott only on public occasions, and one of these occasions was the calling-over of names on half-holidays, styled "Absence" at Eton and "Bill" at Harrow. To see Westcott performing this function made one, even in those puerile days, feel that the beautifully-delicate

The Pilot, 1901.

instrument was eminently unfitted for the rough work of mere routine on which it was employed. We had sense enough to know that Westcott was a man of learning and distinction, altogether outside the beaten track of schoolmasters' accomplishments; and that he had performed achievements in scholarship and divinity which great men recognized as great. "Calling Bill" was an occupation well enough suited for his colleagues -for Huggins or Buggins or Brown or Green-but it was actually pathetic to see this frail embodiment of culture and piety contending with the clamour and tumult of five hundred obstreperous boys.

We were
We heard

It was not only as a great scholar that we revered Westcott. We knew, by that mysterious process by which school-boys get to know something of the real, as distinct from the official, characters of their masters, that he was a saint. There were strange stories in the School about his ascetic way of living. told that he wrote his sermons on his knees. that he never went into local society, and that he read no newspaper except The Guardian. When Dr. Liddon, at the height of his fame as "The man of '66," came to Harrow to preach on Founder's Day, Westcott would not dine with the Head Master to meet him. He could not spare three hours from prayer and study; but he came in for half an hour's conversation after dinner.

All that we saw and heard in Chapel confirmed what we were told. We saw the bowed form, the clasped hands, the rapt gaze, as of a man who in worship was really solus cum Solo, and not, as the manner of some of his colleagues was, sleeping the sleep of the just, or watching for the devotional delinquencies of the Human Boy. Various incidents, trifling but significant, went to confirm the same impression. When Westcott cele

brated the Holy Communion in the Parish Church, he always took the Ablutions, though they were not customary there; and, after celebrating in the Church in the early morning, he remained for prayer and worship at the late Celebration in the School-Chapel. But it was as a preacher to the boys that he made the deepest impression. His sermons were rare events; but we looked forward to them as to something quite out of the common groove. There were none of the accessories which generally attract boyish admiration. No rhetoric, no purple patches, no declamation, no pretence of spontaneity. The voice was so faint as to be almost inaudible; the language was totally unadorned; the sentences were closely packed with meaning; and the meaning was not always easy. But the charm lay in distinction, aloofness from common ways of thinking and speaking, a wide outlook on events and movements in the Church, and a fiery enthusiasm all the more telling because sedulously restrained. I remember as well as if I heard it yesterday a reference in December, 1869, to "that august assemblage which gathers tomorrow under the dome of St. Peter's," and I remember feeling pretty sure at the moment that there was no other schoolmaster in England who would preach to his boys about the Vatican Council. But by far the most momentous of Westcott's sermons at Harrow was that which he preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 1868. The text was Ephesians v. 15: "See then that ye walk circumspectly." The sermon was an earnest plea for the revival of the ascetic life, and the preacher endeavoured to show "what new blessings God has in store for absolute self-sacrifice" by telling his hearers about the great victories of asceticism in history. He took first the instance of St. Antony, as the type of personal asceticism; then that of St

Benedict, as the author of the Common Life of Equality and Brotherhood; and then that of St. Francis, who, "in the midst of a Church endowed with all that art and learning and wealth and power could give, reasserted the love of God to the poorest, the meanest, the most repulsive of His children, and placed again the simple Cross over all the treasures of the world." Even "the unparalleled achievements, the matchless energy, of the Jesuits," were duly recognized as triumphs of faith and discipline; and the sermon ended with a passionate appeal to the Harrow boys to follow the example of the young Antony or the still younger Benedict, and prepare themselves to take their part in reviving the ascetic life of the English Church.

It is to a congregation like this that the call comes with the most solemn and the most cheering voice. The young alone have the fresh enthusiasm which in former times God has been pleased to consecrate to like services. . . . And if, as I do believe most deeply, a work at present awaits England, and our English Church, greater than the world has yet seen, I cannot but pray every one who hears me to listen humbly for the promptings of God's Spirit, if so be that He is even now calling him to take a foremost part in it. It is for us, perhaps, first to hear the call, but it is for you to interpret it and fulfil it. Our work is already sealed by the past yours is still rich in boundless possibilities.

It may readily be conceived that this discourse did not please either the British Parent or the Common Schoolmaster. A rumour went abroad that Mr. Westcott was going to turn all the boys into monks, and loud was the clamour of ignorance and superstition. Westcott made the only dignified reply. He printed (without publishing) the peccant sermon, under the title "Disciplined Life," and gave a copy to every boy in the school, expressing the hope that "God, in His great love, will even thus, by words most unworthily spoken,