THE CHURCHMAN'S COMPANION TO "HYMNS ANCIENT AND MODERN."

BY THE REV. R. Young, M.A.

No. VIII.
NEALE.

THE year eighteen hundred and eighteen, if not remarkable in any other way, is remarkable for the number of events, which during some portion of it, took place in the royal household of George III. On the 7th of April in that year, Elizabeth, the seventh child of George III., married Frederic, the Landgrave of Hesse Homburgh. On May the 1st, of the same year, Adolphus Frederic, Duke of Cambridge, the tenth child of George III., married Augusta, of Hesse. On May the 29th, in the same year, Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, the fifth child of George III., married Victoria, of Saxe Coburg. On the 17th of November, in the same year, Sophia Charlotte, the wife of George III., and the mother of fifteen children, died. Not of marriages and deaths, but of a birth in that year would we wish now to speak. On January the 24th, the eve of the Conversion of S. Paul, and a day itself dedicated to S. Paul's beloved pupil, S. Timothy, John Mason Neale was born, in Conduit Street, London. From his parents he inherited ability. His father, the Rev. Cornelius Neale, took in the year 1812 one of the most brilliant degrees ever taken at Cambridge. He was Senior Wrangler, First Smith's Prizeman, and Junior Chancellor's Medallist; these distinctions prove that if the Classical Tripos, which was not instituted until 1824, had existed in his time he would have attained to the highest position on the classical list, even as he did on the mathematical. He afterwards became a Fellow of S. John's. The whole of the religious activity of the country being then settled in the Clapham sect, it is not remarkable that a spiritually-minded man liked the elder Neale allied himself naturally with that party in the Church, and adopted pronounced Evangelical opinions. Before, however, any party in the Church, or the Church at large, could obtain services of real importance from him he was cut off by a premature death in 1823. The mother of the future poet was Susanna, daughter of the well-known physician and author, John Mason Good, celebrated for his version of Lucretius. Dr. Good had

been in early life a Unitarian, but had afterwards become a zealous member of the Evangelical party. Of such a parentage was born John Mason Neale, a man who has contributed more to the liturgical and patristic literature of the Church of England than any man in the present century, who has enriched the library of that Church with sermons, tales, lectures, hymns, translations, dissertations, adaptations, and versions; who devoted all the powers of an imaginative and learned mind to the advancement of Church principles; who inaugurated in the teeth of opposition and of obloquy new fields of Christian work, and who received as the munificent acknowledgment of his ability, his learning, his zeal, and his labour, an inhibition for fourteen years (the usual term of penal servitude) from the Bishop of the diocese in which he worked, and a stipend of twenty-six pounds a year from the revenue of an Almshouse attached to that branch of the Catholic Church in which he worshipped. What a satire it is on the administration of patronage in the Anglican Church that such a man as Neale should have been neglected and contemned.

Like Alford, Neale took early to composition. At ten he had acquired such a knowledge of Latin as to be able to read the Tragedies of Seneca. He attempted to produce a tragedy of his own. His father having died when he was only five years old, his education was left in the hands of his mother, who, determined to afford her son the best instruction in her power, sent him first to King Edward's Grammar School, Sherborne, Dorsetshire, of which Dr. Harper, the present able President of Jesus College, Oxford, was at one time Head Master, and afterwards committed him to the care of the Rev. A. Russell, Rector of Shepperton, in the Diocese of London. With such advantages it is not to be wondered at that the lad's natural genius for languages was developed, and that he became one of the most elegant classical scholars of the day. To mathematics in every shape, however, he had an invincible repugnance, and the instruction even of the eminent Professor Challis to whom he was for a time sent could not succeed in imparting to him even an elementary knowledge of the science. In 1836, he matriculated at Cambridge, and having won a scholarship at Trinity College, he took up his residence in that noble foundation of Henry VIII. Eminent men were largely to be found at that time at the University. The Marquis of Camden was the Chancellor, the Duke of Northumberland the High Steward, Goulbourn and Law the Parliamentary Representatives; Blunt, au

thor of "Undesigned Coincidences," was the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity; Ollivant the present venerated Bishop of Llandaff was the Regius Professor of Divinity; Scholefield was the Regius Professor of Greek; Whewell was Professor of Casuistry; Challis was Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy; Sedgwick was Professor of Geology; Peacock was Professor of Astronomy; Amos was Downing Professor of the Laws of England; Jarrett was Professor of Arabic; Babbage was Professor of Mathematics; and Henslow was Professor of Botany.

More illustrious names than these it would be difficult to find at any time in the annals of any university. Nor was Trinity College destitute of its own special distinguished sons. The Master was Dr. Wordsworth, the father of the present Bishop of Lincoln. Amongst its teaching staff were to be found such names as Whewell, Sedgwick, Challis, Ollivant, Cumming, Clark, Peacock, and that Robinson, who, as Archdeacon of Madras, had been the last person that had seen Heber alive, and who, having then returned to England, had been appointed Master of the Temple, and Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. Amongst his fellow-students at Trinity the names of several destined to be in after life of some note are to be met with. Amongst these may be mentioned Swainson, now Professor Swainson; Dr. Vaughan, Master of the Temple; Messrs. Forsyth and Hardcastle, the Members of Parliament; the late Lord Lyttelton, Lord John Manners, Dean Howson, of Chester; Conybeare, the author, with Dr. Howson, of the celebrated Life of S. Paul; the eminent classical scholar, Monro; that zealous churchman, Mr. Beresford Hope; Cayley, the mathematician; that conscientious Liberal, Earl Fitzwilliam; and the late Earl of Aberdeen. From such fellow-students as these Neale had an opportunity of selecting his friends. To the intellectual, the spiritually-minded and the refined, Neale would have a natural affinity. In 1839, eight years after Alford had obtained the same distinction, Neale won the Members' Prize for Undergraduates for the best dissertation in Latin prose. This, notwithstanding his well-known brilliant classical scholarship, was the only distinction that Neale obtained during his collegiate career. An absurd rule then prevailed in Cambridge, a rule that was not abolished until 1857, that a student could not graduate in the Classical Tripos unless he had previously obtained honours in the Mathematical. The insuperable difficulty that Neale experienced in the acquaintance of any mathematical knowledge, and

his utter distaste for scientific study, prevented him from satisfying the conditions required by this regulation. He therefore had to go out on an ordinary degree in 1840. Four years later he took out his M.A. degree. The repute of his scholarship was, however, so considerable, that he was appointed Fellow and Tutor of Downing College, a college only founded in 1800, and of which Dr. Worsley was at that time Master.

During his residence at Cambridge, Neale founded with his friend Webb and his brother-in-law Boyce the Ecclesiological Society, known as the Cambridge Camden. Under the auspices of this society the "Ecclesiologist" was published, to which magazine Neale was a constant contributor, signing all his papers O. A. E., (the first vowels of his three names.) He also published, with the help of Mr. Webb, for the same society, the Visitation Articles of Bishop Montague, and a translation of the first book of Durandus, treating of the Symbolism of Churches.

His stay at Cambridge was not, however, of long duration. In 1842 he married Sarah Norman, daughter of the Rev. T. Webster, B.D. In the following year he was presented to the Incumbency of Crawley, a living in Sussex, in the gift of Colonel Clitherow, and worth very little more than one hundred a year. This was his first entrance into the Diocese of Chichester, by the Diocesan (Dr. Gilbert) of which diocese he was afterwards, without reason assigned, for fourteen years inhibited from officiating in any church. Before he could be instituted to this living, however, symptoms of pulmonary consumption set in, and as a last chance for life he was ordered to visit Madeira. In that lovely island, the refuge of the despairing, he spent some time, studying much in the library of Funchal Cathedral, and composing a portion of that Commentary upon the Psalms which he gave to the world sixteen years later, although at an earlier date he had contributed on his return to England a part of it to the pages of the "Churchman's Companion."

In the summer of 1844 he returned to England with his health much recruited, and in search of any suitable sphere of duty. While he was still unemployed in pastoral work he competed successfully in 1845 for the Seatonian Prize, a prize given yearly at Cambridge to the Master of Arts who shall produce the best English poem on a sacred subject. This prize Mr. Hankinson had won nine times. Neale surpassed even this extraordinary feat, however; for, beginning

with this year, 1845, he won the prize eleven times—the most remarkable occurrence in connection with any university prize that has ever taken place.

In 1846 the Earl De la Warr (a Trinity man) conferred on Neale the office of Warden of Sackville College, East Grinstead. Sackville College was an almshouse for old men, and the wardenship, the emoluments of which were ten shillings a week, had previously always been held by some one in social rank only on a par with the pensioners. The College was in a miserable state of decay, and the post of warden was one that few would have had the brave heart to have accepted.

To Sackville College Neale became greatly attached, and through his active exertions the buildings were restored, and the whole tone of the institution elevated. Here the various works for which he became eminent were produced,-"The History of the Patriarchate of Alexandria;" "Hierologus, or the Church Tourists;" the "Introduction to the History of the Holy Eastern Church;" the "Tetralogia Liturgica;" the "Readings for the Aged;" the "Hymnal Noted;" the "Christmas and Easter Carols;" the "Hymns of the Eastern Church;" the Mediæval Hymns;" the articles for the "Morning Chronicle" and for the "Christian Remembrancer;" "Mediæval Preachers and Mediæval Preaching;" "Deeds of Faith;" the "Invalid's Hymn Book;" "Sequences, Hymns, and other Ecclesiastical Verses;" "Sermons ;" "Tales illustrative of the Apostles' Creed;" "Lent Legends ;" "History of the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem ;" "English History for Children;" "Stories of the Crusades;" "Duchenier, or the Revolt of La Vendée;" "The Egyptian Wanderers ;""Evenings at Sackville College with my Children;" "The Followers of the LORD;" "Sunday Afternoons at an Orphanage," "The Unseen World;" "The Triumphs of the Cross;""Stories from Heathen Mythology;" "Poynings; a Tale of the Revolution;" "Hymns for Children;" "Seatonian Prize Poems;" "Hymns for the Sick:" "The Two Huts;" "A translation of the Mater Stabat Speciosa;" "History of Greece;" "History of Portugal;" "Herbert Tresham;" "Agnes de Tracey ;""Ayton Priory;" "Lays and Ballads for Manufacturers;" Theodora Phranza ;" "The Bible and the Bible only the Religion of Protestants;" "Ecclesiological Notes on the Isle of Man ;" "Lays and Legends of the Church in England;" "A Song for the Times'Here's to the Cause ;' ;"""Church History for Children;" "A Commentary on the Hymnal Noted;" "Life of Bishop Torry ;" and