We find in these later years the bishop's aversion to dogma stronger than ever, and now we observe with regret some want of that kindliness of temper always observable in earlier years. He refused to concur in the approval expressed by the other Scottish Bishops, of the sentence on Bishop Colenso. 'Can I join in an excommunication,' he writes, 'because a man will not say that six times six is thirtyseven? Can excommunication alter a matter of fact?' and so on; which is painful to read. Against Bishop Gray, his cry was Law, law, law: the law of the Church of England as a State Establishment; and he looks no higher. One would suppose from his letters at this period, and on this subject, that he had never heard of the Church Catholic, or that he supposed it to have no existence out of England, or that it had no laws of its own. The Erastianism which had so got hold of him by this time is unintentionally illustrated by a passage in one of his letters to the Bishop of London, after the latter's serious illness :—

'Pray, my dear bishop and brother, keep yourself for these things. Any one can do your ordinations and confirmations, and other such business, but no one can take your place at the Privy Council, or in Parliament, or in Convocation. Pray tide over the summer anywhere out of London, and come and spend the winter with me in Italy. I am quite serious. All your other work is nothing to that which you can do, and you only, in the Privy Council in the years to come.'-(p. 447.)

Our readers will perhaps wonder that they have heard so little of Bishop Ewing's performance of similar duties to those he thus relegated to the second place; or of the administration of his diocese, and the progress of his people. But the fact is that we hear little of them after the first years of organisation, of keen energy and interest, and that they apparently ceased to be the chief business of his life. His Diocesan Synod consisted of twelve clergy, as far as we can gather; and his 'charges' were manifestoes, for the most part, to the world without, and not to the 'few sheep in the wilderness' within his pale.

With a few words on the description given here of the PanAnglican Conference, and of Bishop Ewing's attitude towards it, we must bring this review of his life to a conclusion.

What is said of the former must be considered to be the biographer's work; and it could not well be worse in taste and temper than it is. The one aim of the writer appears to be to belittle the Conference itself, and especially the colonial and foreign bishops, to deny their statements, to ridicule their

pretensions, and to represent the entire meeting as a conspiracy against Protestantism in the interests of sacerdotal dictation.' Of such words and of such a temper we cannot approve. Nor is Bishop Ewing's own language better. It needs hardly to be said that he was in the Extreme Left all through; he was averse to the action attempted to be taken about the Bishopric of Natal; he fully approved of the inexcusably discourteous refusal of Westminster Abbey for the closing service. But we had better quote entire what is represented to be the record of a conversation held between the bishop and some unnamed interlocutor immediately after the closing, which will speak for itself :

""What," said the interrogator, "is your main feeling after the Conference?" "Relief, relief, relief."- "Was there any sense of solemnity at any part of the proceedings?" "Only the solemnity of being on board a ship that might blow up at any moment."-" Any possibility of thinking that it was an assembly in which the Spirit of God was at work?" "That depended on where I sat. When I was with the Bishop of Chester (Jacobson), yes; but when near, &c. &c., quite the reverse."—"What was your impression at the conversazione?' "It was like a scene from Hypatia."- "What is the worst thing that has been done?" "That the meeting has taken place at all. You will never get rid of it. They will always be clinging to it. They know that they have got fifty-six names which they can append to any document that they choose."-" What do you think of the pastoral letter?" "It is words, words, words, and nothing else. It was written by the Bishop of Oxford (Wilberforce), and very much shortened and cut down by the others. The Bishop of Winchester (Sumner), by one clean sweep, took out the whole viscera of a sentence in the Declaration on the Councils, and remained the hero of the field on the first day. We fought through it paragraph by paragraph, and by that evening reached the word primitive. Then the Bishop of Oxford proposed that the remainder of the sentence should be referred to a committee, which endeavoured on the next day to undo what had been done on the day before, but they were beaten."-" Great havoc made on the second and third days on the schemes for establishing ecclesiastical tribunals? A splendid speech from the Bishop of London (Tait), knocking them all to pieces. The Metropolitans were kept down by a masterly argument of Bishop Harold Browne. The Natal Question was brought on at the very last moment by a kind of ruse. One or two comical things took place. On the 28th, at Lambeth Church, the first lesson was Tobit ii. None of the American bishops would read it, so the Bishop of Lincoln (Jackson) did." (p. 481.)

'I am not sorry that the battle of the Establishment (in re Colenso) was dropped. It never could have been fought on worse ground. For, consciously or unconsciously, the Bible was felt to be the question at stake, and all the Evangelicals, &c., were to a man with the

priestly party. Had not Dr. Pusey, by a strange infatuation, thrown over the Americans by his tract on the Scandinavian admission first, before the meeting at Lambeth (in which he sneered at the American Church as a whole), they also would as one man have joined the Metropolitans! Happily the Americans' amour propre made them hang in the wind.'-(p. 486.)

After the Conference had separated, he wrote an article upon it, containing even stronger language, which several magazines declined to publish, and which its author at length put forth at his own expense in pamphlet form.

From this time his activity of mind took for the most part a literary direction. The 'Present Day Papers' which the bishop himself projected, and to which he contributed no less than eleven papers, besides editing the whole, served as the outlet for many of his most cherished ideas ; and the series ran to three volumes before it was discontinued. There is much in these volumes that is admirable; and while they exhibit the characteristic faults of the writer's mode of thought, it would be unjust not to acknowledge that they show also much earnestness of thought, considerable charm of style, and an increased degree of spiritual insight. Thought is the best of educations; and Dr. Ewing had now been a thinker for many years.

At this point, however (1871), we must bring to an end our long scrutiny of this interesting life; a life which, however we may lament some incidents of it, was one of high aims, pure affections, and blameless tenour, not unworthy of a Christian bishop. Bishop Ewing passed away in 1873.

We are by no means certain that it is needful to say anything more by way of painting the moral of his career. That he had many winning and lovable qualities as a man, is perfectly clear; and we have already pointed out the unselfishness and generosity with which he discharged the duties of his office. But the Episcopate is not a mere matter of routine to be worked by (as it were) turning a crank. It requires a clear undoubting belief in the spiritual powers of the office, and a strong and straightforward purpose, in order that the Episcopate may convey its full weight, and do the entire work for which it is intended. How far the subject of the present memoir came up to these requirements, we must leave it to our readers to determine.

Another point that occurs to us is, the demoralising tendency of ecclesiastical controversy, and that Bishop Ewing's career exemplifies it. Too often, it is to be feared, the haute politique of parties calls to its aid passions and tempers the

very reverse of spiritual; and we cannot but think that the hard, partisan tone of the Bishop's letters and public utterances in the later years of his life, so unlike the sweet persuasiveness of his earlier years, shows that this influence had told upon him for evil. He is not the first-we fear he will not be the last-to whom 'our unhappy divisions' have done harm. History repeats itself; and the embittered party-spirit and mutual repulsion which are caused by the wide divergence of belief, and still more of speculation, among us in this age recall nothing so forcibly as the factions of the Lower Empire, and the bitter comment of S. Gregory Nazianzen.

ART. VIII.-EARLY MSS. AND MINIATURES.

1. Palæographia Sacra Pictoria. By Prof. WESTWOOD. 2. Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS. By Prof. WESTWOOD.

3. Peintures des Manuscrits Français. By Count BASTARD.

THESE works are on a magnificent scale of size and ornament, which appears to us to be one of the least of their merits. The first is, perhaps, the best introduction in existence to the study of different styles and periods of caligraphy; the second, an illustrated account of early Northern miniature work, only paralleled by Count Bastard's Peintures des Manuscrits. All of them have the great advantage of illustration by the hand of the author. The title of 'amateur' may be applied to them, because no professional workman either could or would do them. We believe we may mention that the late Sir Digby Wyatt resigned in despair the labour and eye-strain of copying the Irish spirals of the Book of Kells, which no precision. or patience except Professor Westwood's could render; and everybody who can get at the books, and will try to follow only one interlaced pattern in any of the Celtic illustrations, will soon see that the backslider was not much to blame.' Nothing but specially trained hands and eyes could reproduce, and so make easily accessible to all students of art and history,

1 The photographs published in the great work of the National MSS. of Ireland (by Government) fail in reproducing the more minute portions of the works.

the terrific intricacies of the Hibernian and Northumbrian scribehood. Critics are apt to forget, we think, that though, generally speaking, an amateur is not a professional artist, every professional ought to be an amateur, or lover of his subject and his work. So, in an important sense, ought every artisan to be too. The universal complaint in art and craft alike is that men do not care enough for their work to do it well, or put their hearts into it. And if we had to refer to art work which should be a standing testimony against halfhearted imperfection, and avaricious or fraudulent scamping, we should produce (along with much of Professor Ruskin's minute naturalism) the plates of these volumes.

The historical importance of the study of miniature is like that of any other branch of fine art. From the eighth to the tenth century it seems to be one of the best means of tracing the classical influence on Northern literature; because it shows what the mind of the Northern scribe was full of, what his imagination dwelt on and suggested to him, and what manner of man, in fact, he was. And from the date of the earliest existing MSS. of the decadence, their ornament and illustration, such as it is, is always an important means of following out the changing but imperishable effect of Græco-Roman art on the derivative styles, Byzantine or barbaric. There was a time when each of the arts in turn died out of practice in Italy, and indeed elsewhere: sculpture, fresco, and mosaic are no more, during the ninth and tenth centuries, except for some of the earliest and rudest of the Lombard bas-reliefs. For a long time nothing is left, we have no trace or record of art work, excepting the Evangeliaries, Missals, and Psalters which the monasteries kept producing. These gave free scope to the spirit of the painter and the scribe, and in fact identified them. In the scriptoria copyists seem to have been raised, by honestly devotional zeal for their work, into the higher sphere of fine art. They did unquestionably believe the things they illustrated, and their intense interest in these gave them the greatest vigour of imagination, even in literal illustration to assist imperfect readers. This was the obvious use of the pictures to barbaric students. The miniatures not only adorned, but explained the text. Anyone who is beginning to read illuminated MSS. in various hands and of various periods will understand this well enough: he will feel how the pithy pictures express the meaning of the text and help him to decipher it. He will be able to enter into the mind of Alfred beginning his study of reading, or of Charlemagne turning his