THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-The People's Archbishop the late_Most Rev. William Thomson, D.D., Archbishop of York. By Charles Bullock, B.D., author of The Crown of the Road,' &c.

1890.

a

RCHBISHOP THOMSON was buried at Bishopthorpe on the 30th of December, 1890, under the shadow of the Palace where he had ruled for twenty-eight years. Only three of his predecessors had held office for so long a time. When he came to the Diocese, he was comparatively a young man, with the vigour and promise of one who, in mind and body, was singularly well equipped for his work. He died in his seventy-second year, his strength hardly yet abated, and having been only persuaded in the last two years to summon Suffragan Bishop to his aid. It has often been said by those who knew him well that he was happy in the moment of his death. Not only was it a death-bed of little pain or distress, but he was at work till within a few hours of the end: he had not to endure what vigorous minds find so difficult to endure, the feeling that he was laid by, and that the work which he had loved and done so well was in other hands. That he was a masculine and strong prelate, will hardly be denied. But most men that knew him rated him higher than this, and claim for him a place among the few great Archbishops. Some go a step farther, and maintain that of all the Archbishops of York since Wolsey, William Thomson was the greatest. Perhaps the estimate is less flattering than it sounds, for the chair of Paulinus,' for one reason or other, has not been favourable to the display of the qualities which make up greatness. Still, the late Archbishop was, by general consent, acknowledged to be a powerful man, whose life was of great value to the Church; and it would not be well that such a man should leave us without some attention being drawn to his career. Vol. 174.-No. 348.

U

Possibly

his

his Life may one day be given to the world; though we have no reason at present to think that such a work is in view. In the meanwhile, Mr. Bullock's little book, the title of which stands at the head of our article, enables us to offer some remarks on the Archbishop's life and work. Without pretending to offer an elaborate account of the subject, the brochure gives correctly enough the salient points in the Archbishop's career, and its quotations are selected with sufficient care and judgment. In speaking here of the late Archbishop, we propose to dwell chiefly on that side of his life which is least familiar to the general reader. So far as his career touched the general life of the Church, or was itself involved in it and helped to mould it, the biography of his brother Archbishop, lately reviewed in our pages, will have brought it sufficiently before us. But his influence, not as a statesman or Member of Parliament, but as a worker in the Church's cause; his lifenot in London but at Bishopthorpe, and in the great towns of the North-this is a side that is less known to most readers. And the contrast which it presents to the Life of Archbishop Tait gives further interest to the picture.

William Thomson was born at Whitehaven in 1819, of parents whose extraction was Scotch. His mother was a Home, and connected with the Marchmont family; a woman of great individuality of character, and with a cultivated taste for poetry, which she transmitted in considerable measure to her son. His father, a man of singular independence and fearlessness of mind, had come to Whitehaven in his early days, had married there, and became subsequently a director of the local bank, chairman of the first Hematite Company that was formed in the North of England, and chairman of the bench of magistrates. The local school was good of its kind, but the lad found his chief education at home, for his principal teachers were books. He was at all times omnivorous in his reading, but no doubt his tastes led him early to the subjects of science and philosophy, of which he showed a singular knowledge even in his early life. At eleven he migrated to Shrewsbury, in those days more even than now given up to the worship of the classic Muse. It is interesting to hear what he tells us some fifty years later of the famous school. He goes down to a Prize Day in 1888, and says:

'When I was at the school I must confess that I should have liked a little chance of studying a bit of science. I had blackened my nose and burned my fingers with chemistry in the holidays, but I should never have dreamed of doing either at the school. I remember on one occasion that my master-Mr. Thomas Henney, for

whom

whom I shall always entertain the highest regard-detected me with another book under my Thucydides: I was reading it in class. It was not a great crime, for when some boys were called up to construe, there was nothing for the rest to do. It seemed quite legitimate, so long as one was not found out.'

The book thus secretly preferred was 'Combe's Constitution of Man,' and we fear that the young reader must have lost caste with his companions, even more than with his master, for the singular preference he showed. In truth, he was never a scholar, as scholarship is understood, nor did he ever simulate the taste. When the time came for modern science and the modern languages to claim their place in the time-honoured curriculum of education, Thomson spoke more than once with no uncertain voice. Giving away the Doncaster School prizes in 1866, he says:

'The reason why we have gone on so long studying Greek and Latin has been because of our conviction that, by training the young in them, we put before them some beautiful models, to which they cannot do better than conform. We furnish them with a series of what have been called moulds and models, in which they may place the English material, so that their own style may become classical and beautiful. But I am not prepared to say that we have no means of teaching a pure and exact style except through the medium of Greek and Latin. I think it quite possible for a person, studying our own tongue in a scientific manner, and with all the appliances which we bring to bear upon Greek and Latin, to form a beautiful and correct style, even though he has never drunk of the fountain of classical languages, or has taken but a slight sip of them.'

So again, in distributing prizes at Manchester, he says:— 'I am afraid that tradition is likely to be too strong for us, and that the old story will go on for a long time to come; that Latin and Greek will still be the staple of education; and that the making of Latin and Greek verses will be the intellectual exercise of the boys of the future as it has been of the boys of the past. I do not for a moment deny that there are masterpieces of beautiful form in the old literature. To deny it would be absurd. I should be very sorry, for my own part, to give up the knowledge I have of these languages, and I remember what an era it was in the expansion of my own thoughts when first I was set to work on the Republic of Plato. But when we speak of Greek and Latin literature, I suppose it is like English and French literature in this respect, that it contains good, bad, and indifferent. It is a great mistake to think that everybody who wrote in Greek wrote beautifully, or that every work composed in Latin about the Augustan era is a model to admire and imitate.'

Sad heresy, this, to come from lips that deep of the Pierian spring at Shrewsbury. U 2

should have drunk Meanwhile, how

ever,

ever, the heretic could now and then make excellent use of the models which he decries: any one who remembers a certain article on 'The Ritual of the English Church,' which appeared in this Review,' will recall a classical allusion which shows not a little familiarity with some portion of the despised literature, and which one would almost think should have pricked the writer's conscience.

his

'From afar off comes a breath of rumour that does not presage peace. Achilles is returning to the fray, with the flame upon head, and with that voice, the very sound of which carries fear and confusion to Trojan hearts. In more sordid prose, Mr. Gladstone rises from nursing his heart upon the War of Troy, and from trimming the quiet woods of Hawarden; and with resolution in his heart, and six Resolutions in his pocket, comes to cast himself in the path of this hated measure,* and to destroy it.'

It is clear that Thomson had not stood out from his compeers either in the school sports or in the school studies; he was neither an athlete, nor a future Ireland scholar. But a public school teaches various lessons, and is many-sided in its influence. The independent and somewhat reserved student was learning human nature; and was training a mind already resolute, and a determined will, for the larger school of public life. From Shrewsbury Thomson went to Queen's College, Oxford, as the College which in those days opened its gates more widely than others to North-countrymen; and here he became first a Scholar, and subsequently Fellow, Bursar, Tutor, and Provost. Here again, though his contemporaries record his friendly bearing and the charm of his society, it is clear that he lived his own life and thought his own thoughts. He read as eagerly and as widely as before; and music-for he was an accomplished musician-solaced his rare leisure with her dangerous pleasures. Those were the early days of the great Oxford movement; but the storm and stress of that convulsion passed him by unheeded. Then, as always, the spiritual question of the epoch presented itself to his eyes in quite another shape. In the final Examination he was, like some other men of note about the same period, placed in the third class. People sometimes demand an explanation of such failures; and the explanation is sometimes missed from its very simplicity. When J. H. Newman was asked to explain his failure in the schools-the logician, the philosopher, the poet, only in the third class-he used to say that there was no mystery whatever in it—‘it was a case of a simple breakdown.' Thomson would have had more

The Public Worship Regulation Bill.

to

to say, if he had cared to say it. Some of the tutors in those days were not the wisest of men; and Thomson's College Tutor advised him to omit some of the books and take in only such books as might procure him a third class. Anything below that class would forfeit the College Fellowship which he coveted; anything above that class represented needless labour. The unsuspected ambition of his nature would probably have appraised such advice at its true value; but the young scholar was already engaged on a secret task, which had more interest to him even then-and was to prove by-and-bye of greater service to him-than the highest class in the list. He was busy with a book which the world presently knew as 'Thomson's Laws of Thought.' Its publication was deferred till 1842, but it was written while he was still an undergraduate, and we believe that it was actually finished before he went into the schools. So accurately had he gauged his own strength, when he deliberately turned aside from the lists where his contemporaries were contending, to match himself with men whose names, in the field he had selected, were of European celebrity. The Laws of Thought' has, no doubt, seen its day, and in the keen struggle for existence has made way for younger rivals. But the book was at the time a marked success; and to have been written by an undergraduate makes it almost a marvel. It came into immediate use at Oxford, and passed through several editions, of which the last, we believe, was issued at the end of last year; and it has set the lines on which logic has been studied in Ireland, America, India, and even Scotland. Compliments poured in upon the writer from all quarters. Logicians, who had long made their own mark, wrote cordially to the new comer who had joined their ranks; and, not forgetting to maintain the superior value of their own dogmas, were lavish of their praise. Dr. M'Cosh, Professor De Morgan, Sir W. Hamilton, welcomed him to their side with ready frankness. But perhaps the most original tribute, and one that would have interested the author most if he had ever come to know it, was only revealed after his death. A present dignitary of the Church, who was just planting his foot on the first rungs of the great ladder, and held a Mastership in a famous school, speaks of the enthusiasm to which the book had stirred him :

'When I was a young master at the school, I was so struck by "The Outline of the Laws of Thought," that, without having ever (that I know of) seen its author, I started one day at 6 P.M. after school, and rode to B, and thence drove on to Oxford, so as to vote for him the next morning as Professor of Logic, returning the same day at once-a ride and drive of about ninety miles.

Some friend