stances, the contemporaneous facts, and the historical surroundings. He had the rare instinct of drawing out the least educated on the one subject which they knew best, and he remarked in later life that he never met with any one from whom he could not acquire some information worth having. At school and college, as in his parish and vast diocese afterwards, this sympathy and intellectual brotherhood with every man, however humble, made him greatly beloved and most efficient in securing the high ends of his calling. His wonderful tact was the result of a rare unselfishness and genuine desire to serve, not, as with most people, of calculation and

care.

His reading was guided by his father, and still more by his stepbrother Richard, who used to say of him that he did more than read books-he devoured them. His father taught him Latin and Greek, and his first literary production was a translation of the fables of Phædrus into verse, made when he was only seven. The other co-rectory in Malpas, recently amalgamated with the adjoining livings, was held by Dr. Townson, who gave the boy the run of his considerable library, and further gratified his literary craving. When eight he was sent to the neighbouring grammar school of Whitchurch, of which Dr. Kent was then master. At fifteen he left home, not for one of the great public schools of England, but for Neasdon, then in the neighbourhood of London, where the clergyman, Mr. Bristow, trained him along with a few others. There he became the companion of John Thornton, son of the M.P. for Surrey, a friendship which was perpetuated by the marriage of their children.1 In Thornton he found one of like mind, and for five years he gave a high tone to the school. Reverence and purity marked all his intercourse, and he proved a tower of strength to the weaker boys, who were encouraged by him to shun vice and profanity. His natural unselfishness and apparent absorption in intellectual pleasures were on one occasion presumed on by the tyrant of the school. Determined to resist him, though well aware he could not defeat his superior strength, Heber, as

1 Rev. John Thornton, the present Vicar of Ewell, Surrey, is a grandson of Bishop Heber, whose MS. sermons and private MS. devotions are in his possession.

described by Thornton, fought him manfully, for the purpose, as he said, of teaching his opponent that tyranny should not be practised on him with impunity. While mastering the higher classics he made great strides in literary composition. His prose essays showed a maturity of thought and an extent of knowledge beyond his years. His verse was especially remarkable. In the spirited lines of The Prophecy of Ishmael, which the boy wrote as a class exercise on the Battle of the Nile after Buonaparte's invasion of Egypt, we see the promise which he was soon so brilliantly to redeem at Oxford, in Palestine. Now it was that he learned to know the Poet's poet Spenser. The Faerie Queen was always in his pocket, and the companion of his solitary walks, while his fellows were at their sports. All through his life he seldom travelled with

That

out a volume of the same copy to read on the road.1 and his Bible formed his frequent resort. His mental growth may be traced in the letters to his friend Thornton, who had meanwhile passed on to Cambridge, and was delighting in the mathematical studies and exact sciences which Heber disliked. In November 1799 he wrote:

"In Greek I go on in the old train, being now deep engaged in Longinus, Prometheus Vinct., and the Epistles with Locke's commentary; besides which, I read the Essay on the Human Understanding for two hours every evening after I have finished my exercise. Locke, you know, I used to think very stupid; but I have now quite altered my opinion.”

When he was still seventeen, the future rector and bishop thus wisely touched a question which nearly a century's delay has made more difficult than ever.

"NEASDON, 24th June 1800.

I fully agree with you respecting the stipends of the clergy. Were Queen Anne's bounty better regulated, and were it ordered that every clergyman of above £200 a year should, bona fide, pay the tenth of his benefices to that, or some other similar institution, and so on in such an ascending scale to the largest preferments, as might be thought right and equal, much of this evil, and all its attending mischiefs of non-residence, contempt of

1 Life, by his Widow, 1830 (John Murray).

the ministry, etc., might, I think, without inconvenience, be prevented. This it is thought was the intention of Queen Anne; but the death of that excellent woman (for I am tory enough to think very highly of her), and the unfortunate circumstances which followed, threw obstacles in the way of the Church which I fear there is no probability of its being able to get over. . .

"I, however, am rather apt to regard the interference of temporal authority in these matters with a jealous eye. The rulers of this world have very seldom shown themselves friendly to the real interests of the Church. If we consider the conduct of the government in the times of the Reformation, and indeed ever since, we shall always find it has been more friendly to its own avaricious and ambitious projects, than to consult what is just and pious.

...

"I think you are very lucky in your acquaintance with Lord Teignmouth; they are such men, as you have described him, that are to keep us from sinking.

"As for those poor wretches whom the oratory of men seduces into schism, I wish they understood the excellent distinction you made between prayer and preaching when I was last in your company; which sentiment of yours corresponded entirely in substance, and almost in words, with a beautiful passage in the fifth book of my favourite Hooker's Eccl. Pol."

"HODNET HALL, 25th August 1800.

".. I am sorry that you are edging still farther off from my haunts; but, however, what are fifty or one hundred miles to two lads with affectionate hearts and hardy outsides? Cambridge and Oxford have, as I believe, a mail running between them, so that at College we are only a few hours' drive asunder. . . . Vale Royal Abbey, or as it is generally or at least frequently called, the Vale Royal of Cheshire, is the seat of our relation, Mr. Cholmondeley, which name not being over classical, I was obliged to speak elliptically. I have been a little interrupted in my Greek by two things; first, the examining of a large chest full of old family writings, which I have almost got through; and, secondly, I have commenced a diligent reperusal of the Old Testament, which I trust I shall, Deo Juvante, finish before I go to Oxford."

"HODNET HALL, 19th September 1800.

"You ask me what is my plan of operations in my studies. I am afraid that I have of late a good deal relaxed from my

former diligence, and my advances in Homer and algebra are not equal to what I hoped. I have, however, not totally neglected these; and I have got on fast in Guicciardini and Machiavel, and at my spare hours have read one half of Knolles' History of the Turks, which you know Johnson highly, and I think deservedly, commends. I, for my own part, have never met with a greater mass of information, or, considering the time when it was written, a more pleasing style. If ever you should meet with it, if you are not daunted with a thick folio, closely printed, you can scarcely find a more agreeable companion for those hours in which you are not employed in other ways. You will laugh at me for studying Machiavel, but I read him principally for the sake of his style; though I frankly own I think much better of him than the generality of the world (who probably have never read him) profess to do."

.

"MALPAS, October 1800.

The masquerade was not certainly were some charbehaved exactly as if they

I have been a much gayer fellow than usual of late, having been at a race, and also at, what I never saw before, a masquerade. This catalogue of jaunts, though not much perhaps for a girl, has been a great deal for me, and has indeed quite satisfied me. If these things are so little interesting even while they have the charm of novelty, I think I shall care very little indeed for them when that is worn off. so entertaining as I expected. There acters well kept up, but the most part were barefaced. It was given by Sir W. Williams Wynn, and though certainly much inferior in splendour to Mr. Cholmondeley's ball, was very well conducted. Sat de nugis, ad seria reverto. My studies go on as usual. Machiavel I rather admire more than at first. My Greek studies will be soon, I fear, gravelled, if I continue at home. My brother particularly recommends me to attend the public lectures on astronomy and mathematics at Oxford, as he says they are at present very clever.

"We have some tumults in this neighbourhood. In Staffordshire the mob proceeded to domiciliary visits with halters and agreements, forcing the farmers to the alternative. All is, however, quiet at present."

Next to reading, the recreation which most delighted Reginald Heber was drawing-architectural and landscape. We find him writing to his friend Thornton on his leaving school :

"I send you a sketch of a building which I passed coming from the north, which will interest you as much as it did me; I could almost have pulled off my hat as we drove by. It is Sir Isaac Newton's house as it appears from the north road.

Though I have heard it taken notice of, I never saw any print or drawing of it."

The art was a pleasure to himself, and a delight to his correspondents during his travels in Russia and in India. The water-colour sketches which accompanied not a few of his letters, illustrating his pen-and-ink descriptions, were greatly prized. His keen power and habit of observation were shown in his attention to natural history, and his open-air studies of insects, birds, and beasts.

When the youth went to Oxford in his eighteenth year he personally knew no one in the University. But he was known to several. Brasenose College, in which he was entered in November 1800, was emphatically the college of Cheshire men. His brother Richard was a Fellow, and hastened home from a book-hunting tour on the Continent to introduce him. His father had been a Fellow, and both parents went up with him. The Bishop of Chester, Dr. William Cleaver, was Principal of the College, and the senior Proctor and several of the Fellows were known to him. Mr. Hugh Cholmondeley, who became Dean of Chester, took him by the hand until his brother's arrival. The Rev. T. S. Smyth, afterwards Rector of St. Austell, Cornwall, became his tutor. After temporary accommodation in what he called a "garret," he secured the rooms ever since identified with his name in No. 7, on the right-hand corner after entering the quadrangle, one stair up. The windows overlook Brasenose Lane and the famous chestnut-tree in the garden of Exeter College. The chapel and hall are in the same condition as then; the library has newer fittings and a list of all the works of the Bishop, whom the College reckons among its famous sons, with Foxe and Burton, Milman and F. W. Robertson. On the one side he commanded the dome of the Bodleian, on the other he was close to All Souls, of which he was soon to become an honoured Fellow. After three months' experience of college life and study he thus wrote to his Cambridge friend, Thornton :