women will lift up their hearts to God in thankfulness, and in earnest prayers that you may indeed do a great work to His glory and to the good of His Church in a new and even greater sphere of usefulness.  No doubt much of my thoughts and apprehensions about the religious and social state of England is very erroneous.  I have but little time for reading about what is going on, and though I have the blessing of Codrington’s good sense and ability, yet I should like to have more persons to learn from on such matters.  I am willing and anxious to believe that I am not cheerful and faithful enough to see the bright side as clearly as I ought.  Your letters have always been a very great help to me; not only a great pleasure, much more than a pleasure.  I felt that I accepted, occasionally even that I had anticipated, your remarks on the questions of the day, the conduct of parties and public men, books, &c.  It has been a great thing for me to have my thoughts guided or corrected in this way.

’Your last present to me was your volume of “Bampton Lectures,” of which I need not say how both the subject and the mode of treating it make them especially valuable just now.  And there is a strong personal feeling about the work and writings of one where the public man is also the private friend, which gives a special zest to the enjoyment of reading a work of this kind.

’Certainly it is one of the many blessings of my life that I should somehow have been allowed to grow into this degree of intimacy with you, whom I have always known by name, though I don’t remember ever to have seen you.  I think I first as a child became familiar with your name through good Miss Rennell, whom I dare say you remember:  the old Dean’s daughter.  What a joy this would have been to dear Mr. and Mrs. Keble; what a joy it is to Charlotte Yonge; and there may be others close to Winchester whose lives have been closely bound tip with yours.

’But, humanly speaking, the thing is to have Bishops who can command the respect and love and dutiful obedience of their clergy and laity alike.

’One wants men who, by solid learning, and by acquaintance too with modern modes of criticism and speculation, by scholarship, force of character, largeness of mind, as well as by their goodness, can secure respect and exercise authority.  It is the lawlessness of men that one deplores; the presumption of individual priests striking out for themselves unauthorised ways of managing their parishes and officiating in their churches.  And, if I may dare to touch on such a subject, is there not a mode of speaking and writing on the Holy Eucharist prevalent among some men now, which has no parallel in the Church of England, except, it may be, in some of the non-jurors, and which does not express the Church of England’s mind; which is not the language of Pearson, and Jackson, and Waterland, and Hooker, no, nor of Bull, and Andrewes, and Taylor, &c.?  I know very little of such things—­very