“Among the archbishops,” says the Dean, “there are a few eminent rulers distinguished as much for their transcendent abilities as for their exalted station in society; but as a general rule they have not been men of the highest class of mind. In all ages the tendency has very properly been, whether by election or nomination, to appoint ‘safe men;’ and as genius is generally innovating and often eccentric, the safe men are those who, with certain high qualifications, do not rise much above the intellectual average of their contemporaries. They are practical men rather than philosophers and theorists, and their impulse is not to perfection but quieta non movere. From this very circumstance their history is the more instructive; and, if few among the archbishops have left the impress of their mind upon the age in which they lived, we may in their biography read the character of the times which they fairly represent. In a missionary age we find them zealous but not enthusiastic; on the revival of learning, whether in Anglo-Saxon times or in the fifteenth century, they were men of learning, although only a few have been distinguished as authors. When the mind of the laity was devoted to the camp or the chase, and prelates were called to the administration of public affairs, they displayed the ordinary tact and diplomatic skill of professional statesmen, and the necessary acumen of judges; at the Reformation, instead of being leaders, they were the cautious followers of bolder spirits; at the epoch of the Revolution they were anti-Jacobites rather than Whigs; in a latitudinarian age they have been, if feeble as governors, bright examples of Christian moderation and charity.”
Church Preferment.
Lord Chancellor Thurlow, on reading Horsley’s Letters to Dr. Priestley, at once obtained for the author a Stall at Gloucester, saying that “those who supported the Church should be supported by it.”
Peace Statesmanship.
There is nothing more wholesome for both the people and their rulers, than to dwell upon the excellence of those statesmen whose lives have been spent in the useful, the sacred, work of Peace. The thoughtless vulgar are ever prone to magnify the brilliant exploits of arms, which dazzle ordinary understandings, and prevent any account being taken of the cost and the crime that are so often hid in the guise of success. All merit of that shining kind is sure of passing current for more than it is really worth; and the eye is turned indifferently upon, or even scornfully from, the unpretending virtue of the true friend to his species, the minister who devotes all his cares to stay the worst of crimes that can be committed, the last of calamities that can be endured by man.
The Burial of Sir John Moore.
It had been generally supposed that the interment of General Sir John Moore, who fell at the Battle of Corunna, in 1809, took place during the night; a mistake which, doubtless, arose from the justly-admired lines by Wolfe becoming more widely known and remembered than the official account of this solemn event in the Narrative of the Campaign, by the brother of Sir John Moore. In Wolfe’s monody, the hero is represented to have been buried
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light,
And the lanterns dimly burning,—
an error of description which has, doubtless, been extended by many pictorial illustrations of the sad scene, “darkly at dead of night.” The Rev. J. H. Symons, who was chaplain to the brigade of Guards attached to the army under Moore’s command, and who attended the hero in his last moments, relates that during the battle Moore was conveyed from the field into the quarters on the quay at Corunna, where he was laid on a mattress upon the floor, and the chaplain remained with him till his death. During the night, the body was removed to the quarters of Colonel Graham, in the citadel, by the officers of his staff; whence it was borne by them, assisted by Mr. Symons, the chaplain, to the grave which had been prepared for it on one of the bastions of the citadel. It being now daylight, the enemy had discovered that the troops had been withdrawing and embarking during the night; a fire was soon opened by them, upon the ships which were still in the harbour; the funeral service was, therefore, performed without delay, under the fire of the enemy’s guns; and, there being no means to provide a coffin, the body of the general,