He had always appeared to me as a very real and notable, and therefore interesting man, though for some reason not apparent a man manque, a man who ought to have been more notable than he was.  I quite understand and follow you in placing him with, or rather in the class of, Whately and Paley, but he fell short of the robust activity of the first, and of that wonderful clearness of the other, which is actual brightness.

Your account of the question of Lordship is to me new and interesting.  I have never called the Scottish Bishops by that title.  I should be content to follow the stream, but then we must deal equally, and there is the case of the Anglo-Roman bishop to meet, especially now that the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill has been repealed; but only on Friday I addressed one of the very best among them “Right Rev. Bishop M——.”

You will, I am sure, allow me the license of private judgment in the two expositions about the church in p. 5.  You praise both, but the second the more highly.  To me the first seems excellent, and the second, strange to say, wanting in his usual clearness and consecutiveness.  For having in head (1) most truly said that Christ “instituted a society and revealed a doctrine,” he then proceeds as if he had quite forgotten the first half of the proposition, and conceived of the society only as (so to speak) embedded in the doctrine.  Also, I complain of his depriving you of the character of [Greek:  iegeus], which indeed I am rather inclined to claim for myself, as “He hath made us kings and priests” ([Greek:  hiegeis]).

     I hope you are gradually maturing the idea of your promised
     summer expedition to the south, and that before long I shall
     hear from you on the subject of it.

     Will you remember me kindly to Miss Cochrane, and believe me,
     ever affectionately yours,

     W.E.  GLADSTONE.

The Dean was greatly affected by a terrible calamity, which happened in his house in Ainslie Place, where, in June of 1866, his niece Lucy Cochrane, one of his family, was burnt to death; out of many letters of condolence which he received at the time, I have only space to insert three—­one from the Rev. Dr. Hannah, then head of Glenalmond College, an accomplished scholar, to whom our Dean was much attached, and upon whom he drew very freely in any questions of more recondite scholarship, another from the Rev. D.T.K.  Drummond, and the third from the Premier:—­

     Rev. Dr. J. HANNAH to DEAN RAMSAY.

     Trinity College, Glenalmond, N.B.

     June 15, 1866.

Dear Mr. Dean—­I must write one line, though I know you will be overwhelmed with letters, to say how deeply distressed and shocked we are at the news in this morning’s paper, and how profoundly we sympathize with you under this fearful affliction.  I thought instantly of Mr. Keble’s lovely poem in the Lyra Innocentium:—­

“Sweet maiden, for so calm a life,
Too bitter seemed thine end.”