ART. IV.-Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. By W. F. Hook, D.D. Dean of Chichester. Vol. I. Anglo-Saxon Period. London: Bentley.

THIS volume, its able author tells us, 'comprises the history of the Anglo-Saxon Church.' It would have been a more acceptable gift to English Churchmen had it really done so. To have to piece out our knowledge of the origines of our own Church from Southey and Inett and Soames and Lingard,-from the sparkling points made by an essayist, or the flat pages of the dullest of chroniclers who has not even the merit of knowing facts, or the polemics of a controversialist, or the disquisitions, however large-minded, of a Roman Catholic,-is a state of things not creditable to our Church literature. And few tasks could have better occupied the Dean of Chichester, than to use the well-earned leisure that crowns the noblest of practical lives, in tracing the growth of that English Christianity, the sturdy strength of which he has himself under God done so much in these latter days to renew. The subtle unravelling of metaphysical controversies is not in Dr. Hook's line. And to trace the process of compacting the Papacy out of the Latinized European Churches, has been the larger task of the leisure of another English Dean. It would have been a work most interesting to English Churchmen, and most congenial to all the antecedents of Dr. Hook, to depict the growth of the most unmetaphysical and most un-Latinized of Churches, the Church not of subtle controversy but of practical work, the Church which of all was most truly a national Church, and that Church our own. Here, and here only, the older Britannico-Roman Church organization was swept away from its foundations. And the Italian graft did not take kindly to the oak in which it was grafted, and was quickly overpowered. And the terrors of a journey through Frank-land or the Alps, and the un-Latinized Anglo-Saxon tongue, and the absence of all elements whatsoever of the old Roman Empire, kept foreign influences of all kinds practically apart; and reduced to a sentiment, the more strong because its strength was almost never tested, the romantic, childlike, and happily ignorant reverence felt by the Anglo-Saxon towards the distant and civilised and apostolical mother Church of Rome. And the Church of our forefathers accordingly grew from its own roots, a Church beyond all others national. And that Church was also emphatically the Missionary Church of the time. What the Scot did in the sixth and seventh centuries, was the work of the Anglo-Saxon in the eighth. Mission work was his special work. Where he planted the Gospel,

And

it took root and lasted. And as abroad, so at home, it was a Church of specially practical and pastoral labour. The parochia (in the final and narrowest sense of the word) of Churches across the water was significantly the 'shriftshire' of our own. the parish priest with his parish church dates from days as early as those of Theodore. And though the formal words of Baptism and of the Mass were only explained and not translated (as Lappenberg seems to think), and the Council of Cloveshoo under Cuthbert only regretted without altering the chanting of psalms in an unknown tongue; yet the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer, and the words of promise in the Marriage Service, and perhaps some other things were in the vernacular, and the two first were enforced as a necessary knowledge on all; and Saxon sermons were preached every Sunday; and prose and verse Psalms and the Gospels in Saxon were as familiar as in the days of MSS.. they could be; and the Lord's-day was kept, or ordered to be kept, much after the English ideal of the present day. And the system of the Penitentials, which, though we may well doubt the wisdom of the means adopted, was yet the first grand attempt to realise systematically through pastoral care the Christian life throughout the flock, did not indeed arise, but received its first great development in the Church of our Saxon fathers. Add to this the characteristic Saxon pilgrimages, linking us with Rome, with Jerusalem, and even in the ninth century with India, and importing in return the learning and refinement of foreign lands: and the singular fervour of devotion, which counts so unparalleled a beadroll of Saxon kings and queens and nobles, not among the founders only, but among the devoted and world-renouncing monks of ascetic monasteries: and the later religious guilds and brotherhoods, framed no doubt after the doctrine of the day, but indicating a real and devotional Christian feeling; and the pre-eminent learning and piety of the Northumbrian Church above all, with its Cuthbert and John of Beverley, its Bedes and Alcuins and Egberts, showing its vitality even in the day of its captivity, in the romantic and touching faith of the bearers of S. Cuthbert's corpse. Surely here is a subject, which with the flood of light poured upon it by recent antiquarian labours (still, however, sadly incomplete and imperfect), would well repay the historian's toil. And who better than Dr. Hook (if he will but get up his facts) to describe a Church, into the spirit of which he can so largely enter, and whose life and tone his peculiar experience and kindred feeling will so truly appreciate and understand?

However, we must be thankful for what we have, if Dr. Hook will give us no more. He has chosen to limit himself to a single and narrow side-view as it were of this larger subject.

He has tied himself to a line of official biographies; and must needs follow where they lead him, even though they turn him aside from flowery meads to barren sands, or whirl him like a railroad along their own unswerving line, now and then indeed to a glorious prospect from some lofty embankment, but too commonly along a blind cutting, or by the backs of the suburbs of the cities which he passes, instead of to the busy marts and palaces which are the centres of their real life. No doubt our Saxon line of primates contains its fair sprinkling of great names. There are, it must be owned, to set against them, Tatwins and Bregwins in the list, of whom like the Moores and the Herrings of a later date we have to remind ourselves by the help of Mr. Stubbs's 'Registrum Anglicanum,' that they did once inhabit respectively their monastic or palatial homes of Canterbury or Lambeth. And the ingenuity with which Dr. Hook has devised an agreeable digression to hang upon such barren pegs is amusing. But for the most part our Archbishops were at least men who lived a life worth telling. On the other hand, they were rarely the leading men of the time. Our objection to the plan of such biographies--and they threaten to become common, since Lord Campbell set the fashion,-is that they take us only now and then to the real moving spring of events, while commonly they are compelled to make some secondary, though we own usually interesting, person the principal figure in the picture, and to tell us only by the bye what we chiefly care to know. The life of Dunstan, which Dr. Hook has treated in the noblest spirit, and perhaps that of Augustine, are almost the only periods throughout the volume in which things fall naturally into their right position, and where Dr. Hook's point of view coincides with that which an unfettered historian would take. That of Theodore, which can alone claim to be parallel with these, divides its interest with the contemporary and more brilliant and erratic career of Wilfrid, and the latter is unhappily spoiled in Dr. Hook's pages by a singular and inexcusable ignorance of the common facts of the history itself. But take Alfred's reign, and how exceedingly is the story marred and mutilated by the unavoidable disproportion with which it is here treated! Who ever heard of Ethelred, or who but an editor of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of Plegmund, as having any appreciable share in the truly English reforms, which Alfred (and if any one beside him, Asser) originated and accomplished? Yet it is Ethelred and Plegmund to whom Dr. Hook is compelled to refer his narrative. And except in these three periods,-those of Theodore, Alfred, and Dunstan,-our archbishops present a series of good men, above rather than below the average bishop, yet rarely taking the lead in works of

more vital interest than the securing the privileges of their archiepiscopate, or the giving a triumph to one or other of two rival monasteries through the contingent advantages of possessing their

graves.

In truth the accident which gave Canterbury the primacy, did not preserve to it in Saxon times the real or continued leadership of the English Church. Canterbury schools and Canterbury plain song were in repute in England only so long as Italian refinement had still something to impart to Saxon ignorance. And Egbert's school at York speedily superseded the former; while Wilfrid's boasted improvements in the antiphonal chant, and Aldhelm's nationalizing of church music, eclipsed the latter. And Glastonbury, again, was the great school of later times. The monastic life drew its inspiration from Lindisfarne, or from Wilfrid at Ripon, or from Malmesbury and Glastonbury, but not until Dunstan's time from Canterbury. The monastery of Ripon, again, under the same Wilfrid, originated the spirit of missionary enterprise, and the Wessex monasteries supplied a Boniface to improve upon the lesson; but though the latter sought Archbishop Brihtwald's blessing, he took with him the commendatory letters of his own Wessex Bishop, and looked to him for guidance in the instruction of his heathen converts. And the curious letter of the Bishop of London of the same date, in the Appendix to Smith's Bede, discloses a very disjointed condition of the southern province, and little submission to Canterbury. The Lichfield schism followed at no long interval. And it was not until the Danes had wasted the Northumbrian Church, and Athelstan had made England one kingdom, that even a technical primacy over the whole country was yielded without dispute to the Southern Kentish See, to be disputed yet again in Norman times, and settled at length and for ever by the efforts of Lanfranc.

A series of well written biographies, however, to turn from Dr. Hook's choice of subject to his treatment of it,—is always an amusing book, though it is not a history. Anecdote and personal adventure come home to every one. And biographies written with the humour, the weighty sense, and the large and generous spirit of Dr. Hook, and dealing with a state of society at once sufficiently akin and sufficiently alien to our own to awaken both sympathy and curiosity, form a volume that reads in many parts like a novel for interest. And if to understand the men of our own time be a condition of writing sensibly the history of those who lived before us-or if, again, to have taken a manly and vigorous part in existing controversies prepare the mind most thoroughly for a just and equitable estimate of both sides in those that are past-or if a large spiritual experience

be specially helpful to keep a Church historian awake to the hidden stream of the inner Christian life, and to teach him to detect its signs under the ritual, or the æsthetics, or the politics, or the worldly fortunes of the Church, however obscured by them, or however alien to modern habits of thought—or if, once more, a mind trained by action rather than by study, and versed in men rather than books, be apt to be specially ready with comparisons, grotesque or weighty, but in either case vivid, and with trains of thought that link the new to the old, and give life to the latter by bringing them at once to the range of our own experience;-all these qualifications the greatest among our pastoral clergy assuredly has, and his book bears traces of them in every page. He lacks indeed one qualification, necessary perhaps to the highest class of biography-an enthusiastic admiration of his heroes. His tone towards the Anglo-Saxon Church is a curious compound of candour and contempt-of candour, intentional, deliberate, self-reminding, which covers an involuntary and for ever self-rebuking contempt. His book is almost an expansion of the thesis, the formal propounding of which occupies its earliest pages:-that, while everybody knows and nobody can deny how utterly unenlightened our forefathers were, yet for all that the nineteenth century would be wise not to throw stones. Strip accident from essentials, and judge men from their own point of view, and there is not so much to choose after all, he tells us, in the greater matters of intellect, morals, or religion, between the dark ages and our own. And this candour has both an apologetic and a satirical side, and both double-edged. He is so alive to the foibles of the present age, and so determined to be fair towards those of the past, as to let slip no opportunity of an innocently suggested parallel, by which both are placed on a level, and contemptuous modern readers are left in the dilemma of acquitting or condemning their ignorant forefathers as they please, but in either case of dealing a like measure to themselves. A modern revivalist is thus let in for a defence, nolens volens, of medieval belief in still continued miracles. And Dunstan's alleged ventriloquist tricks are most ingeniously sheltered under a parallel with anonymous letters in the Times or elsewhere. And the wise man and the mesmerizer are exhibited to rebuke the contemptuous sneer on the face of the enlightened reader at the recourse for the like reasons in older times to the relics and graves of saints. And the idleness of the Canterbury students are excused by modern University example, and serves (proh pudor !) as a peg whereon to hang in Dr. Hook's own person a defence of University foxhunting! The result, however, is a most amusing narrative, written in a piquant style, and yet by no means wanting in the