of Shropshire, where, as Rector of Hodnet, Heber spent more than fifteen years of his busy life before leaving for Calcutta. Malpas, commanding the Roman camp at Chester and the marches of Wales, represents the bad step (malus passus) or difficulty of the pass at that northern point. The Romans crowned the height-upwards of four hundred feet-with a fortress, succeeded by the castle of the first Norman earl, of which the present church formed the chapel, a wall enclosing the whole. Roman 66 villa" and Norman castle are now represented by the circular mound on the north side of the church. From its ancient tower the keen eye may take in the beautiful English scene, from the ships in the Mersey to the domed Wrekin, and west to the vale of Llangollen.

Here, in 1770, there came as Rector, Reginald Heber, M.A., Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Hayber, or Hayberg, from which the name is taken, is a hill in the Craven division of Yorkshire, on the family estate of Marton.1 The elder brother purchased for the young clergyman the living of Chelsea, and died, leaving a widow. As his heir male, the clergyman succeeded him in the old Vernon estate, Hodnet,3 Shropshire, and soon exchanged the Chelsea living for that of the higher co-rectory of Malpas-within riding distance of Hodnet. Tradition still tells how he was wont to drive in a coach and four across the then comparatively roadless country from Malpas to hold service at Hodnet, where the old hall and the adjoining rectory were low and unhealthy. In Geneva gown and bands, as was customary, in the wig of the period, and with a gold-headed staff, the future Bishop's father was a

1 Whitaker states, in The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven, in the County of York (3rd ed., 1878), that upon the ruins of the Martons arose the family of Heber, or more properly, as it is vulgarly pronounced, Hayber; so called, undoubtedly, from a place in the neighbourhood named Hayber or Hayberg-the hill surrounded by a haia or foss and paling such as enclosed the ancient forests. In 1601 it was granted by Lancelot Marton to Thomas Heber, Esq., ancestor of Richard and Reginald. Thomas Heber added to it, and died very wealthy in 1548. The volume contains a fine picture of West Marton Hall, residence of the Heber family, embosomed in wood. "No house has been connected with greater virtues or equal talents," writes Dr. T. D. Whitaker.

2 The Yorkshire Hebers go back to 1461, when Thomas Heber was witness to a deed. His brother Oswald was slain at the Battle of Wakefield, fighting for the Duke of York.

3 See Appendix.

stately squire and zealous parish priest.

He wrote verses, which others published, such as an "Elegy among the Tombs at Westminster Abbey,' ," and "To George III. on his Accession." 2 He lived to his seventy-sixth year, just long enough to hear his son recite Palestine in the theatre of Oxford University.

Reginald Heber, the father, was twice married. His first wife died early, leaving an infant son, Richard Heber, who became the greatest book collector of his own or any other day, the friend of Sir Walter Scott, and M.P. for the University of Oxford. He was the "Atticus" of Dibdin's Bibliomania. His taste seriously injured the family estate of Hodnet when he succeeded to it. A saying of his was that every good library should have three copies of a book-one to read, one to lend, and one on the shelf. On his death the Bibliotheca Heberiana, collected from his Hodnet and London houses and his three years' residence in Holland, appeared in 1836-1837 in thirteen parts, and 216 days were occupied in selling the volumes by auction. The 150,000 volumes realised £65,000. Alibone, the American, pronounces Richard Heber "the most voracious" helluo librorum in the annals of bibliography. The Gentleman's Magazine for January 1834 tells how, on hearing of a curious book, he would travel by mail coach three, four, or five hundred miles to obtain it, fearful to entrust his commission to a letter. In his house at Pimlico, where he died, every wall, chair, table, and passage was filled with books from top to bottom. So also his house in York Street, and that in the Oxford High Street, besides collections in Paris, Antwerp, and Brussels. He had what John Hill Burton, in that delightful volume The Book Hunter, calls the most virulent form of book-mania-that of duplicating. But this was the keynote to his popularity, for "though, like Wolsey, he was unsatisfied in getting, yet, like him, in bestowing he was most princely. Many scholars and authors obtained the raw materials for their labours from his transcendent stores. These, indeed, might be said less to be personal to himself than to be a feature in the literary geography of Europe."

On the 30th July 1782 Richard's father married Mary Allanson, eldest daughter of the Rector of Wath, in Yorkshire, and on the 21st April 1783 Reginald Heber was born to 2 Among the Oxford Poems.

1 In Pearch's Collection.

them. He was followed by Thomas Cuthbert Heber, afterwards Fellow of Brasenose, and incumbent of the Marton living, who died in 1816, and by the only sister, Mary, who survived to a good old age, and restored Hodnet Church as it now is. The mother designed and the father built on a new site, at a cost of £1500 in those days, the present Rectory of Malpas, in which Reginald was born. From the spacious window of the room, around which the present Rector has inscribed the fact, there is a charming view of hill and dale and river, with vistas of Wrexham and the Welsh hills.

The church in which Reginald Heber, as a child, received gracious influences bears the name of St. Oswald, whom we may most accurately describe as the missionary king. It commands a district, almost every acre of which suggests memories of the royal convert of Iona, the friend of Aidan, and, in his too short reign, the evangeliser of Northumbria. King Oswald was the martyr whose head the medieval sculptors delighted to represent as held in the hand of St. Cuthbert next to his heart. The neighbouring town of Whitchurch, where young Heber first went to school, according to one tradition, stands near the field of Maserfelth, where Oswald fell by treachery, calling on God for mercy to the soldiers whom he led. In the boy's time the building was inferior to what it has been since its restoration in 1842, and especially since the dedication of the rich east window in memory of the poet and missionary bishop in 1887. But it has all along been a fine example of the enriched Gothic of the later days of Henry VII., with sepulchral monuments of the Cholmondeleys and Breretons or Egertons in the chancels bearing their names.

From the first dawning of intelligence, and all through the forty-three years of his life as child, youth, and man, as student, pastor, and bishop, Reginald Heber showed the same "gracious" character and mental activity, redeemed from priggishness and vanity by a humble fear of God and a joyous delight in whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. He was fortunate in his religious training at a time when the evangelical revival had hardly begun to influence the Church of England, and the century of missionary and philanthropic

1 Two of their works are beautifully pictured in the new edition of Ormerod's History, vol. ii. p. 614.

enthusiasm was only at hand. In the darkest hour of the Church's history, the hour before the day that in 1792 ushered in "the era of universal benevolence" towards the heathen and the slave, the ignorant and the oppressed, the boy Heber spent the first fourteen years of his life under the hourly influence of parents and teachers whose wisdom and culture were directed by the love of God. His great contemporaries, William Carey and Henry Martyn, each of whom afterwards influenced him, were called from comparative obscurity and poverty to work for the Master in the world, while he was born in the luxury of the "lord of the manors and patron of the rectories of Marton and of Hodnet." In 1782 Carey, the parish clerk's and weaver's son, had left the Church of England for the despised Baptists, and was about to be immersed by Ryland in the river Nen as "a poor journeyman shoemaker." Henry Martyn was only fourteen months older than Heber, and struggled all his student life against poverty, till an East India chaplaincy opened his way to the Mohammedans of India, Persia, and Arabia. No university knew Carey; Cambridge learned in time to glory in Martyn; Oxford sent forth Heber, its most popular and successful son, to be the missionary metropolitan of Asia, Africa, and Australasia. The same grace of God which bringeth salvation appeared to the three youths in the same dark period of the Church, and sent them far hence to preach to the nations, using alike poverty and wealth, ignorance and wisdom, obscurity and reputation, and uniting all three in a brotherly catholicity of spirit and aim. Such men were to the modern missionary century what in the apostolic group Paul and Peter and John were to the first.

Reginald Heber was called from the womb to the service in which he gave up his life. Long after, when discussing John Wesley's account of the new light received from the Moravian Boehler, that faith must be "instantaneous," Heber wrote1 of conversion thus: "With the term instantaneous we have no disposition to quarrel. A man must begin to believe at some time or other; and if the truths of Christianity are first impressed on his heart after he arrives at years of discretion, he may, beyond a doubt, remember in certain cases 1 The Quarterly Review for October 1820, vol. xxiv. p. 22.

the very day and hour in which he first received conviction. The only danger is lest, by making that circumstance a necessary mark of conversion which was, in fact, only an incidental accompaniment of it, we should presumptuously confine the grace of God to a single mode of operation, and exclude from our scheme that which is, probably, the most common of all His dispensations, wherever the seed sown at baptism grows up thenceforth, through the means of education and example, and by the continually renewed though silent influences of that Spirit by whom we were then first sanctified."

Reginald's mother, who long survived him, pondered, like another, the things of his precocious childhood. Twice in the first six years of his life disease was nearly fatal to him, but his trust in God and careful obedience brought him through. When bled by the apothecary, after the fashion of those days, he called out, "Do not hold me; I won't stir." When driving in the Yorkshire hills during a dangerous storm, and sitting on his mother's knee, he said, "Do not be afraid, God will take care of us," words which she recalled long after when the Bishop was on his way to Calcutta, and, above all, when the news came of his sudden death. From the first his father encouraged him to read the whole Bible, and not any summary or extracts, so that when he was seven years old he had become familiar with the words and saturated with the style of the English version, to a degree which coloured his spiritual and literary life. The habit of frequent prayer, and the delight in praying for himself and others, which marked his whole career, began in the earliest years in the stillness of his own room. When he was about fourteen years of age his mother missed her manual of preparation for Holy Communion. Reginald brought it back to her with the assurance that he had, during the previous three weeks of his school holidays, mastered its contents, and with the earnest request that he might thenceforth be with her at the celebration of the sacrament.

The boy's memory retained, and his imagination lighted up with unusual vividness what he learned from omnivorous reading and a genial habit of conversation. If he failed to give the date of any event he could always detail the circum