THE LATE BISHOP OF DURHAM.
[To THE "EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR.") SIR,—The Dean of Durham's letter in your issue of to-day will gladden the hearts of those who not only loved Bishop Moule as a man, but who delighted in his fine scholarship. In many ways he was an impeccable stylist; his English prose charms with its simplicity, its restraint, and its perfect appropriate- ness. May I quote the closing passage of a sermon I heard him preach in the chapel of his beloved Trinity College, Cambridge, In the year 1907, at the Commemoration of Benefactors? The sermon was published under the title of Wise Men and Scribes: "I have done with this brief tribute to the memory of the 'wise men and scribes' to whom I am so much a debtor since those good days of old. I leave them standing in my view upon the scene of recollecting thought somewhat as Virgil's hero saw grouped together, amid the bowers of odorous laurel, beside the brimming river of the Happy Fields, the white-tired shades of the departed just. There was the patriot warrior, wearing the scars of his devotion; there the stainless priest, found faithful to the last; the poet, true and good,•whose song was worthy of his Inspirer; the inventive helper of human life in its development; the man who, by whatever merit, had left his memory green. The names of which I have essayed to speak are green indeed and living, and pregnant of fruitful intimations of the opportunity for service and for the winning of grateful recollection which this wonderful place sets before the successive generation of its leaders. Those leaders of long ago I greet again with hail and farewell, and also with Wieder- sehen, thinking of them as the denizens now not of a pale Elysium, void of a living Presence and of a holy Throne, but of the Paradise where they rest with Christ, and from whence they shall be brought again with Him.'
Winchester College, May 22nd.
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