Claughton.
The tenure of his successor Claughton, afterwards Bishop, was but for a single term; and he seems to have left little memorial of it except a singularly elegant Latin address on the appointment of Lord Derby as Chancellor. Elegance, indeed, was Claughton’s characteristic as an orator,[[1141]] but I should not imagine that he had much strength or very wide or keen literary knowledge and enthusiasm. Of Mr. Arnold we have spoken.
Doyle.
There were foolish folk, not without some excuse of ignorance (if that ever be an excuse) for their foolishness, who grumbled or scoffed when he was followed by Sir Francis Doyle. There had been some hopes of Browning, which had been foiled—if by nothing else—by the discovery that an Honorary M.A. degree was not a qualification; and it must be owned that curiosity to see what Browning would do in prose on poetry was highly legitimate. Moreover, the younger generation was busy with Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, who had not turned Tennyson and Browning himself out, and they knew little of Sir Francis. Better informed persons, however, reported of him as of an Oxford man of the best old type of “scholar and gentleman,” a person of very shrewd wits, of probably greater practical experience than any Professor of Poetry had ever had, and the author of certain things like The Red Thread of Honour and The Private of the Buffs, which, in their own peculiar style and division, were poetry sans phrase. The report was justified by the new Professor’s Lectures.[[1142]] They are frankly exoteric; but they are saved by scholarship from the charge of ever being popular in the bad sense. They adopt as frankly, and carry a little farther, that plan of making the lectures, if not exactly reviews of particular books new and old, at any rate causeries hung on particular texts and pegs, which the vernacularisation of the Chair had made inevitable, and to which Matthew Arnold himself had inclined gladly enough. They are, though not in the least degree slipshod or slovenly, quite conversational in style. But they deserve, I think, no mean place among the documents of the Chair. Their easy, well-bred common-sense, kept from being really Philistine (which epithet Sir Francis good-humouredly accepted), not merely by their good breeding, but by the aforesaid scholarship, by natural acuteness, and by an intense unaffected love for poetry, might not be a good staple. But if the electors could manage to let it come round again, as an exception, once in a generation or so, it would be well, and better than well.
Shairp.
Of Principal Shairp so many good men have said so many good things that it is almost unnecessary to add, in this special place and context, the praise (which can be given ungrudgingly) that he has always, in his critical work, had before him good intentions and high ideals. Much further addition, I fear, cannot be made. When I read his question, “Did not Shakespeare hate and despise Iago and Edmund?”[[1143]] when I remember how Shakespeare himself put in the mouth of the one—
“I bleed, sir, but not killed”;