BISHOP WILSON'S BIRTHPLACE.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—With reference to the interesting article on Bishop Wilson in the Spectator of December 3rd, I can testify to the respect in which his memory was held in his birthplace, Burton, near Chester. My home was close to it, and when I was a child I was shown the cottage where he was born and the high chair in which he had sat as an infant. This little village, where the houses straggle up the red sandstone street, is in the Wirral, the tongue of land between the Mersey and the Dee, where lie the broad marshes of which Kingsley has sung in his musical lines, " 0 Mary, go and call the cattle home, across the sands of Dee;" and the blue Welsh hills beyond must have been familiar to him in child- hood. My father used the Bishop's book, " On the Lord's Supper," and that and his "Sacra Privata" were given to me by Prebendary Kempe when he prepared me for confirma- tion; the very name of the former shows the different point of view from which the Holy Sacrament was regarded in the Bishop's days as compared to the time subsequent to the Tractarian movement; that ie, the Bishop seems to have re- garded the Sacrament not so much from a sacrificial point of view, but as being the memorial of the crowning act of self-devotion of a Life which he wished his readers to imitate. Personal piety was the key-note of his writings. I suppose that the " Maxims " reviewed in the Spectator have been taken out of the " Sacra Privata," a book whose sober wisdom breathes an atmosphere of peace and brotherly love.—I am,
Hotel d'Angleterre, Biarritz, December 5th.
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