THE DOCTOR OF DIVINITY.

T TOOK my husband from his mother as a spoilt boy of forty." The speaker was a silver-haired little lady, with a gentle voice and a quiet smile. The Doctor (as he liked to be called, "for any fool may be a Canon," quoth he) had slipped upon the stairs the previous day and injured his arm. I inquired how he did. "His arm troubles him," replied his lady, "and to-day he is a little irritable ; for you must know," she continued in her gentle voice, "my husband is at once the greatest and the least of men." From this I gathered that the good man's philosophic lore had not enabled him to endure the physical discomfort with more than common fortitude.

Beyond the Cathedral precincts the Doctor himself might at this hour have been heard directing the attention of a class of undergraduates to the Thirty-nine Articles. "I do not know," he remarked, in one of his famous asides, "whether any of you young men may be con- templating Holy Matrimony. If such, indeed, should be the case,- may as well inform you that there appear to me ti b three distinct stages in Matrimony the first, Devotion ; the second, Toleration ; the third, Aversion. I myself, I may add, am now rapidly approaching the conclusion of the second stage." My first acquaintance with the Doctor I owed to my top-hat. Let his letter, which I still treasure, speak for itself :— 4' DEAR AND REVEREND SIR,— I was glad of your appointment as one of our Minor Canons, not on the ground of music only (on which I trusted to experts) and of your status at College.; but because you reminded me of the young Oxford Graduates of my time, in being a- gentleman in manners and free from slang, which Heaven knows applies to very few of the present horde of Graduates, and also in being dressed like a gentleman ; I mean in a black coat, black trousers, a chimneypot hat, and a waistcoat and tie and collar of the old type, not the M.B. (Mark of Beast) waistcoat and Popish neck-cloth, which is the repu:sive dress of the priestlings of the present time. And when I voted in Chapter, I said, 'I am no judge of Mr. Dolphin's musical qualifications, but I vote for him because he is a gentleman in manners and in dress.' So you just see where I am, and what I think about you, and what has happened.

Lam, Yours faithfully and cordially,

A. S. FARRAR."

Alas as the weather grew warmer, and the top-hat gave way to a soft Homburg, I noted a colder gleam in the Doctor's kindly eye ; and when the black trousers gave place to a pair of grey flannel, the good man could no longer contain his disgust. The bell for Evensong was uttering its last notes ; the white-robed Choir was ranged within the Slype. The solemn hush fell on us as the Doctor, preceded by the Vergers and Minor Canons, was ushered in. The bell ceased. Then the Doctor turned towards me with these emphatic words : "I cannot think, Mr. Dolphin, why you havetaken to dressing like a cad. Let us pray." The Amen to the Vestry prayer that day lacked somewhat of its wonted sostenuto effect. It betrayed, particularly in the Treble and Alto parts, signs of a suppressed tremolo. But the Doctor had delivered his soul.

He was, indeed, a stately old Don of the Early-Victorian type, faultlessly dressed, as becomes a Cathedral Digni- tary. If in precision of attire he rivalled Charles Honey- man, in deportment he out-rivalled Mr. Turveydrop. "Do look at that old peacock, sunning himself," once said the Dean. Heaven forbid that I should slander the memory of so good a man by attributing to him any touch of personal vanity, yet it may not be denied that when he walked abroad the consciousness of a stately presence never left him. Did I say never ? Ah, once.

I had sent a little bullet-headed-Chorister one morning to bear a note to the Organist in the Song School. Freed for a space from the irksome inaction of the stuffy classroom, in sheer joy of heart the boy sped like an arrow across the sunlit Close, and doubled like a rabbit through the dark entry which led into the Cloisters. As ill-luck would have it, the Doctor that morning, calling in the aid of gentle exercise to the better digestion of his breakfast, had betaken himself with top-hat and umbrella to the perambulation of the Cloisters. With head erect and with mind full of the history of "The Cult of the Sacred Heart" (a subject upon which he proposed to address the little children of the town on Ascension Day), he was now homeward bent, when, thud ! a little bullet-head—hard driven with the impetus of swift momentum—came upon the very spot where the great man's breakfast was in the final process of digestion ! Overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster the boy, with a hurried "Sorry, Sir," under cover of the passage gloom made good his escape.

A few moments later, through my classroom window, I beheld the Doctor with every stitch of canvas set bearing down upon the School. He broke in upon us, and pointing with his umbrella to the awe-stricken Choristers, gave vent to some such words as these : "Mr. Dolphin, your boys are the rudest boys I have ever known. They go rushing about the Cloisters in a way that argues neither reverence for God nor respect for man. I have just now been nearly knocked down by ocie.Of thern " (here his hand moved sympathetically towards histolden watch-chain). "The punishment must be exemplary. • It shall be something the whole school will remember. You will, therefore, this afternoon—give all the boys—a half-holiday !" And the good man swung . .

out of the classroom with a. great show of indignation. Many were the letters he wrote me, and all Who but he could have written this one ?

"DEAR MR. DOLPHIN,— • • I do not *ant to put you out of love with your Hood ! If the Oxford Tailor tells you that they are using this shiny red silk, I give way ; else the old custom was a silk not shiny.- If the Tailor really can change it, I, if I were you, should let him do so. However,] was pleased at your manner of wearing it. Mr. Sneyd, the Head of All Souls, who died in 1858, having been a beau (some said a roué) at Bath, would never take his D.D. degree. Dressed in the tip-top of fashion, he always came each Sunday to St. Mary's with the procession of Heads ; but of course as an M.A. came last in front of the two Proctors. His servant attended him to the Vestry room and always arranged his M.A. hood so as to show about three inches of the red silk lining at the bottom. It was a lesson to me ! I always arranged my M.A. hood in that way from 1852-1864 and my Doctor's hood analogously from 1864 to the present time. If you watch me you may see me fidgeting in Cathedral to re-arrange my hood, if in sitting down I have disarranged it. If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well. Yours ever most cordially, A. S. FARRAR."

One day he had been into the town to buy a Durham M.A. hood as a present for a needy Graduate. He returned in a state of great agitation. The hood was not the correct shade He rehearsed the scene. "What the deuce, Sir, do you mean," he had said to the tailor, " by changing the colour of our hood ? " "Now, do you think, Mr. Dolphin, • it was unbecoming in me to ;ay 'What the deuce ' ? I have asked Atkinson, the Sexton, his opinion of the words, and his reply to me was : ' Well, Sorr, they wull coom ! ' " In his early Oxford days, as a Fellow of Queen's, tradition has it that the Doctor's energies were directed cowards the elevation of the College servants, for whom he held a weekly class, and the abasement of the Provost, with whom he had a feud. A certain sermon by the Provost, it is said, had elicited the highest enconium from the members of the High Table. The Doctor, like Brer Rabbit, "lay low, and kept on saying nothing " ; but throughout that week it was noticed he was big as the moon at the full. On the Sunday following he was delivered in this sort.

' It was his turn to preach. The Bidding Prayer ended, he thus began : "Pressure of work has made it impossible for me to compose a sermon of my own worthy your attention. I therefore crave your kind indulgence while I read a sermon of a Bishop who presided over the See of St. Asaph one hundred and fifty years ago, the good Bishop Beveridge." There and then he read out word for word all the most striking passages in the Provost's great sermon of the previous Sunday ! He had guessed in what park that deer was fatted.

A learned man in truth he was. The literary and theological world would be the richer to-day had he not been over-sensitive to criticism. His table-talk was unsurpassed even by his sherry. No mind was ever Mt.& stOred. He poured forth out of his treasure thingS new and old. Earnest he was, too, where instruction, or sermons, were concerned. It had been my privilege to preach;in Cathedral on Good Friday upon the Brazen Serpent. •After Service the Doctor waylaid me. "The Serpent," he said, "id almost too disgusting a creature to be mentioned in the pulpit ; but I will write " ; and thus he wrote :—

" MY DEAR MR. DOLPHIN,- . I would sum up my criticism of your sermon by letting you understand that when you had a disagreeable subject like a ' serpent ' to handle, you had not sufficiently taken care to cover

the painfulness of the allusion with words and thoughts of beauty. You would, I think, in your preaching derive benefit from reading sermons written under different forms of environnassit ' (to use the new slang phrase) in''Church life. The clamour now in reference to Sermons is for excitement, not instruction; but Christianity is not used up • and we are not to substitute flimsiness for solidity. You need not be pedantically learned ; but be instructive. Make the topics of your sermons that which is employing your thoughts. I need hardly say that you must not obtrude your own private studies in your sermons : e.g., if you arc hot about the Westcott and Hort controversy, it is not a subject desirable for an ordinary (or an extraordinary) congregation !

I take the liberty of naming one further suggestion, which I have made a rule for myself, but which is almost too private and too sacred to unveil. It is this. Let your preaching be mixed at every stage with private prayer. When I am choosing a subject for preaching, I look up to God for guidance. I write the sermon in prayer. As I mount the pulpit steps I breathe the prayer that I may be the means of doing sonic good. As I deliver the parts which I think likely to stir up souls to God, I pray inwardly that God may seal it on their consciences ; and when I have preached one of my best sermons (and I cannot of course fail to be conscious that I have preached what intellectually is worth hearing) I go home and throw myself on my knees in the deepest humility and plead that any errors of opinion may be made innocuous, and that my unworthiness may not prevent the truth from going to the hearts. I again apologise for revealing this as a hint to you. If you make and preach your sermons in prayer, they cannot fail to be useful ; but it won't do to give to God the parings of one's time. Pardon my lengthiness, and forgive my frankness.

I remain, Ever yours cordially, A. S. FARRAR."

May the good old Doctor rest in peace—for he has gone this score of years to his long home.

ARTHUR R. DOLPHIN%