Now with a good book there is really no difficulty, as we wish we could say there is no excuse. Great persons have sometimes special services. We have seen, for example, Freemasons ordering a service and marching to church, with lights, and stars, and symbols enough to frighten Lord Ebury and 'my dear' Fremantle into their graves, to say nothing of

'The venerable good archdeacon, he

Who is himself his whole archdeaconry ;'

and the fit that might befall him at the sight thereof.

If then, great men, have special services, why not smaller men; so that whenever the college enjoined special attendance on its domus-men and servants, the service might be in English for their sakes, and on their account? Nor need any difficulty arise when quire-service is the rule of the chapel. New College and Magdalen, with their schools for the little prophets, might, with less than a week's work, provide a body of boys sufficiently instructed to sing without fault, before the Throne of Grace, the daily service in Latin. And as those noble Colleges have already cleared out their Augean stables, and hindered their antechapels from being on Sundays as bad as in the old time was 'the walk of Poule's,' no hindrance need suggest itself even on Sunday afternoons. All the visitors would be presumably University men or educated gentlemen; and if any curious child of Calvin, or son of the Tabernacle, chose to form one of the congregation, we must remember, and he too must remember, this would be going to the nuisance, and not the nuisance to him. Every way-for the sake of the men, for the sake of the service-for their advance in Christian scholarship, for its improvement in solemnity and power-should we rejoice to hear, not merely, as now, a Latin sermon, a Latin Litany, at Oxford, but the full service day by day-Psalm, Scripture, Prayer, and Anthem in the language of S. Jerome and S. Gregory.

And even this may be, and we may live to see it. Meanwhile, one use there is of this book which an English clergyman can put it to, and bless the authors while using it. Hindered by his position, by that of his parish, by the circumstances of the day, from saying his service in church, or attending it in chapel, the clergyman on his journey or in his chamber-shut up,' like a second Jeremiah, but not from the same cause-at home or abroad, may carry it with him, it is so handy, and read it, it is so clear, and use it for the reciting of his daily devotions and prayer; the holy rite and rule to which he is bound by duty as well as promise to conform.

And when once he has got the good old words of the book ingrained into his very soul, from using it in his pleasant walks,

and his hours of recollection and thought, first from obligation, then from love,-when this Collect shall remind him of that green close, this Psalm of that singing woodland, this Gospel of that deep valley standing so thick with corn, this Canticle of that sounding silvery stream,-he will be just in the mood of mind to take it into college, to his father the Warden, and his brethren the Fellows, and say, 'Here: this book is instinct with music; now let us make it vocal with praise!'

475

ART. IX.-Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson, M.A., Incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, 1847-53. Edited by STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M.A., late Chaplain to the Embassy at Berlin. In 2 volumes, with Portraits. London: 1865. ROBERTSON of Brighton is a name which has risen to reputation and honour in the Church of England by a path far removed from the beaten track by which clerical fame is usually attained among us. He died young, and while he lived he was, so far as the Church in general, and his own position in it went, obscure. The period of his popularity extended over exactly six years, and the sphere within which it ranged was the town of Brighton. He never held any preferment more distinguished than the incumbency of a proprietary chapel, and beyond its walls his influence found a definite resting-place only in a Working Man's Institute of his own establishment. At his death nothing of his had been published beyond a single sermon and a few lectures to mechanics. Moreover, his position was not only unnoticeable, but isolated. He stood entirely apart from his clerical brethren. His temper was too sensitive, too refined, too disdainful, to seek the transient celebrity which is gained by what are called 'men of the day,' through hanging on to other men's skirts, or mounting other men's shoulders. But there is, happily, a road to fame and influence, which is not cut out by the efforts of ambition, or opened up by patronage; along which a great master of thought may traverse unconsciously, and the glorious end of which he may never live to see. Robertson, during his brief ministry at Brighton, was being led along this path without knowing, or even suspecting, the fact. He was, unwittingly, making for himself a position among the homilists of modern times, which is unrivalled, in the estimation of his friends, even by such names as Manning and Newman.

Robertson was born February 3, 1816. His childhood and his youth were just such as his after years would lead us to suppose. Great mental power, a highly wrought imagination, a tone of chivalrous devotion which pervaded his whole being controlling, and, in some instances, unduly influencing, his course of action,these were among his earliest characteristics. Withal, he possessed that refined modesty, which shows itself, not so much in keeping in the background, as in taking his own proper place in the foreground, without betraying a consciousness of self. His father's profession, the army, had a charm for him in his childhood, which,

so far from wearing off as age came on, only grew with his growth, and intensified with the strengthening of his character, and deepened with the advance of life. The sacrifice which, in obedience to his father's will, he made of this most cherished wish, tinges with a kind of sadness his whole career. Notwithstanding his high sense of duty, and the intense earnestness with which he entered upon and carried out every undertaking, there still appears very clearly throughout his life the ever-present regret that he was not a soldier. He was educated at the Academy in Edinburgh, attended the classes at the University of that city (Mr., afterwards Bishop Terrot, being his tutor at the time), and returned home at the age of eighteen. Very shortly after this he was articled to a solicitor in a country town,-the most uncongenial alternative as regards choice of profession which could have been offered to such a mind as Robertson's. No wonder that he threw it up after a year's trial. And then the prospect of his wish being accomplished grew brighter. Captain Robertson relented, and sought a commission from the Horse Guards. It was refused on account of age. Interest was used, and while it was at work, and when it seemed unlikely to be successful, his father's original desire that his son should take Holy Orders received a powerful furtherance from the advice of two clergymen whom the latter fell in with at Cheltenham. The result was that he went up to Oxford, placed his name on the books of Brasenose, and matriculated in May, 1837. As though to intensify the bitterness of the sacrifice which he made in renouncing the army, a letter arrived a fortnight after his matriculation, offering him a commission in a cavalry regiment. But the die was cast, and his father declined to put a force on events, and oppose what appeared to him like his son's destiny.

Robertson never took kindly to Oxford. Its life in none of its phases suited him. The common run of undergraduates he despised. He looked down upon their mode of spending their time as frivolous, and despised them as unintellectual. The fact was, that besides being thoughtful above his years, he was actually beyond the age at which men usually enter upon their University career. When he matriculated he was twenty-one years and a quarter old, and, as he did not begin residence till the following October, he commenced his undergraduate course close upon the age at which most men take their degree; and the complete period of an University career makes, as every one knows, a far greater difference in the tone and cast of a young man's character than the same length of time spent elsewhere, or taken from any other part of life. Moreover the associations of Oxford had no charm for him. He cared little for antiquity as such. The venerable was always far lower in his esteem than

the beautiful. This, indeed, was the chief defect in his organization, and we shall have occasion to remark it again. The consequence was that he never became, heart and soul, an Oxford man. His age removed him beyond sympathy with the undergraduates of his own standing, and his tastes found only repulsion in the graver life and ancient fame of Oxford. The juniors he contemned as mere boys, the seniors he disliked as mere dons. He read much, but to no point; he resisted every effort made to induce him to go in for honours, and finished by taking so excellent a pass that he was placed as an honorary in the fourth class in the same list in which the present Archbishop of York appeared as a third. This was in Easter Term, 1840. He lived, however, to regret the way in which he had spent his time at Oxford, and he expressed his regret in the following passages, for the benefit of a young friend to whom he wrote in 1851, in answer to a request for his advice as to the best way of spending an University career.

T

"9, Montpelier Terrace, Brighton, June 8, 1851.

My dear Kennion,-It is with some reluctance that I write to you on the subject of your studies; as, in the first place, I have no right to give an opinion; and, in the next, I quite feel the truth of what you say in your letter to your mother, that none can decide for you a question with all the bearings of which none but yourself can be acquainted. She is extremely anxious, however, that you should decide rightly, and has written to me to ask what I think. So I am sure you will not think that I am intruding advice. The chief point seems the question of reading for honours. Now, I believe with you, that honours make little or nothing in practice, so far as they bear upon a man's future success; that is, the prestige of them does little in life-is forgotten or slightly looked upon by the large world. But the mental habits got insensibly during the preparation for them is, I think, incapable of being replaced by anything, and this quite independently of whether a man succeeds or fails in his attempt. To my idea the chief advantage is the precluding of discursiveness. For three years, or four, a man has an aim- -a long-distant, definite aim. I defy any young man to create this aim for himself. History, with contemporary authors," is a very vague plan at best. But grant it well mapped out, still he has chosen his own aim, cannot be certain he has chosen well, and becomes distrustful of the wisdom of the plan, because his own,-will infallibly find that ripened experience will not approve the line chosen, inasmuch as, being untravelled by him, he only selects it by guess. Difficulties break his ardour: he cannot struggle with a difficulty while half sceptical as to the unalterable necessity of overcoming it; and at last, having read de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, he finds that, whatever he may have got of bitter experience, one thing he has not got, and that is the steady habit of looking forward to a distant end, and unalterably working on till he has attained it-the habit, in short, of never beginning anything which is not to be finished. At college I did what you are now going to do-had no one to advise me otherwise; was rather encouraged in it by religious people, who are generally-at least, the so-called religious-the weakest of mankind; and I now feel I was utterly, mournfully, irreparably wrong. The excitement of theological controversy, questions of the day, politics, gleams