crously impossible. An amusing parallel is given by "Free-Lance" in one of his letters, wherein he asks whether a man can get into a clothes-basket, grasp the handles and lift himself off the ground.

Even if the rein were fastened to the carriage-box, it could not mend matters, for no rein is strong enough to sustain the weight of a horse. Many a bearing-rein has been broken by a falling horse, the instinctive flinging forwards of the head snapping the leather rein as if it were packthread. Even the hook has been dragged out of the saddle by the bearing-rein, and when we remember that the force was exerted upon the sensitive mouth of a horse, it is clear that cruelty is superadded to folly.

Another "reason" for the use of the gag bearing-rein is that it gives the horse such a noble appearance. People see the horse champing its bit, flinging foam-flakes right and left, tossing its head, rattling its harness, and assume that the horse is acting in the pride of its strength and fulness of spirit. Whereas it is suffering agonies of pain, and is trying to gain a mo

of the legs instead of the weight of the body, | mentary relief by these head tossings and it cannot exercise its full strength.

Take ourselves, for instance.

Supposing that a man has to drag a heavy truck behind him, or push a heavy barrow before him, does he bend his body backwards or forwards? And, if his head were tied back so that it rested on his shoulders, could he pull a heavier weight than if his head were free? And, as to stumbling, could he walk with a surer foot upon uneven and stony ground if his head were dragged back so that he could not see the ground?

When anything absurd is fashionable, "reasons" are plentiful as blackberries, and common sense is utterly ignored.

I have already mentioned that cutting away the frog of the hoof was defended on the ground that it was a preventive of thrush, quitters, and other diseases. So there are thousands of human beings, possessed of average intellect, who really think that the bearing-rein is invaluable as a guard against stumbling and an absolute preventive of falling!

If the bearing-rein were fastened to the carriage-box, there might be some faint grounds for thinking that it could hold the horse up; but how a horse can be held up by tying his head to his own back, is ludi

harness rattlings.

Who ever saw a horse champ and foam at the mouth when at liberty? Or who ever saw a horse free in a field plant its fore and hind legs apart, curve its body backwards, and hold its head above its shoulders? Yet this is the attitude invariably assumed by "gagged" horses when standing in the streets. In fact, they are trying, by pressure in front and behind, to contract the spine as much as possible, and so to relieve the intolerable pressure on the mouth.

There is much more to be said on the subject, but the inexorable claims of space preclude further development of it. I must therefore conclude with an account of a recent personal experience of the bearing-rein.

Not long before these lines were written, I engaged a cab for the purpose of making a series of visits to a suburb of London, taking with me one companion and rather heavy luggage, weighing about one hundred and seventy pounds.

On the first journey, I was struck with the fact that the driver never used his whip, and yet that the horse went quite freely, although the road had been recently "mended" by spreading flints and other stones of irregular sizes over it.

DEAN STANLEY.

In

He had seen the possibility of this combination realised in his own father. the preface to the "Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley," he says, in reference to the Bishop of Norwich's work as a parish priest and as a prelate:

"There existed" (apart from all connection with the Oxford movement of 1834) "a sound form of moral and religious life, not the less admirable because it sprang from a zeal tempered by common sense, and because it aimed-not so much at the interest of a party, or even of a Church, as at the good of the whole community. Nor is it without interest to follow the career of one who, both politically and ecclesiastically, belonged to the liberal movement of the day, in whom the passion for reform and improvement, which characterized that movement, had not yet been superseded by the passion for destruction.'

"THE HE romance of the Episcopate is | Some attempt ought to be made to sketch his gone" said some one, when the fatal character and work for the sake of such as stumble of Bishop Wilberforce's horse wish to know what is to be known of so notable arrested his bright and versatile career. In a contemporary: notable, in a very special the death of the Dean of Westminster much way, alike for what he was and for what he more than the romance of any one order, or was not. For in Dean Stanley we see the function, in the Church of which he was the best principles of liberal thought, of advanced glory and strength, is extinguished. The culture, of personal religion, without those Bishop of Winchester was a great prelate of excesses and limitations by which they are the Anglican communion. The Dean of West- too often impaired and hampered. Liberalism minster was a great Churchman in that wider without destructiveness; culture without and higher sense which overlooks the barriers moral indifference; piety without fanaticism, that divide one communion from another. are not so common that, when we see them We should hardly exaggerate if we said that in one just combination, we should not when he died, Dean Stanley stood higher in record their beauty. the respect and affection of a larger and more varied circle of members of many Churches than any other ecclesiastic in the world. By all in his own Church, at home and abroad, except a few standing at two opposite extremes of fanatical intolerance, he was held in esteem and honour. The English Nonconformists recognised in him a friend, who understood their position, and sympathized with their best traditions. In Scotland his name was a household word; and even the ultra-Calvinists, who could not find the "root of the matter" in him, and the ultraPresbyterians, who hold that "the deil and the dean begin wi' ae letter," forgot their rigidities in his genial presence. On the continent, in all societies, from that of the Papal court to the modest home of the Protestant pasteur"—from the palaces of Petersburg or Berlin to the quiet library of Döllinger-among Roman Catholics, Old Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed, his great position, his many-sided affinities, his social charm and grace, his intellectual eminence, won for him a universal welcome. In America, all Churches and classes reChurches and classes received him with open arms. They seemed to see in him the representative, and, as it were, the custodier of all that old-world culture which so controls their republican imagination, and which is so seldom united -as it was in him—with an open-hearted sympathy with the beauty and the hopefulness of all that is young and new. "The Dean of Society," he was sometimes called, by people whose outlook does not range beyond the smoke of London; but on many societies which had scarce any other link to that great Babel, and on many Churches whose names ao one knew or cared for in London but himself, the tidings that he too had "gone over to the Majority" fell like a cold eclipse.

"Such a type of liberal"-adds the Dean, with a touch of that quiet scorn which he could apply so gently but effectively-"would not, perhaps, altogether fulfil some modern exactions, but it was not thought unworthy of the kindness and friendship of such ecclesiastics as Reginald Heber, Arnold, and Milman, or such statesmen as Lord Melbourne, Lord Russell, and Lord Lansdowne."

The influence of this father was prolonged
son became
and strengthened when his son
Arnold's pupil at Rugby. Few men have left
behind them so little written in proportion to
the much imparted as Arnold. His pupils
were his "living epistles." They carried
out of Rugby not only an inspiring reverence
for their master, and devotion to the good to
which they saw he was devoted, but the
living influence of principles that are at the
root of all useful, social, political, or religious
progress. To perpetuate these principles of
rational godliness, to translate Arnold into
English life and character, thought and
action, Stanley regarded as his first duty in
the world when, as Fellow of Oxford, he
One
entered on his professional career.
part of that duty was discharged in writing
his master's life.

That house at Rugby, said Carlyle, was one of the rarest sights in the world-a temple of industrious peace." The " Life' which depicted that noble industry was Stanley's first literary work; and nothing he wrote afterwards outweighed it in real value and interest. It preserved and concentrated, in a literary form of rare excellence, the impressions produced by Arnold's strong opinions and emphatic personality on the most sympathetic and capable of the minds that he had trained. What Plato's Dialogues have done for Socrates, Stanley's Memoir has achieved for Arnold. The book was published in 1844. Next year its author became "Select Preacher" to the University, and six year's later a Canon of Canterbury; in 1853, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church; and finally, in 1863, Dean of Westminster. These are the several steps of his ecclesiastical preferment, the last of which admitted him to the very place in the Church which, one would say, he had been born to fill. Throughout these grades of professional advancement he rapidly acquired literary fame.

un

traditions of the Desert and the Promised Land, or the records of his own Westminster. His faculty of vivid reproduction of the past, of picturesque illustration, of adaptation of every collateral aid and association in producing the one perfect impression he wished to fix in the memory, was equalled by any literary craft we have ever known. This faculty, and the wonderful tact and skill with which he wielded it, never showed to greater advantage than in one of his lesser, but most exquisite and characteristic performances his first Rectorial address at St. Andrews. We remember well two passages in point, and the affectionate enthusiasm which they stirred in his youthful hearers. We quote but one. Referring to the young Alexander Stuart, the pupil of Erasmus, the boy Archbishop of St. Andrews, who, when but eighteen years of age, fell by the side of his father, James IV., at Flodden, he said:

wede away,' surely none was "Of all the flowers of the forest' that were there more lovely than this young Marcellas of the Scottish Church. If he fell under the memorable charge of my namesake on that fatal day, may he accept, thus late, the lament which a kinsman of his foe would fain pour over his untimely bier."

He never was much of a theologian, in the scientific sense; and no one would think of adding his name to the illustrious roll which records the names of the To recount his literary works, so manifold Barrows, the Souths, the Taylors of the past, were they, would occupy pages. In addition and of the Maurices, and others, of the to the "Life of Arnold," the "Sinai and present, who have built up the fabric of Palestine," the "Lectures on the Jewish Anglican Dogma, or have swayed the whole and Eastern Churches," and the "Historical religious thought of their generation. His bent Memorials of Canterbury," and of Westwas towards the characters, scenes, associa-minster, already referred to, he published tions, of the past, in their relation to the wants and interests of the living present; and he gave it full scope in that series of brilliant works which he devoted to the illustration of the history of the Jewish and the Eastern Churches; the scenes and traditions of Sinai and Palestine; and the memorials of the great cathedral and the great abbey at whose altars he had served. Exact dogmatists might mark here and there a vagueness of definition; keen critics might detect

a

historical inaccuracy at this or that minor point; but no one in reading any of his books could misunderstand the firm faith in a Divine righteousness and love, the generous width of human sympathy, the lofty scorn of moral baseness, the just and clear view of the real princples involved in any question, the love of truth, that shone over every page; and the dullest eye could not but kindle as it traced the splendid panoramas in which he unrolled the history of the Jewish or the Oriental Church, the

three or four volumes of sermons and one or two of lectures and addresses, two volumes of commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians, "Essays on Church and State,' "Lectures on the Church of Scotland," and several minor works-to say nothing of constant contributions to reviews, magazines, and leading journals. Among these were, for many years, the articles he wrote for these pages.

He cordially recognised in Good Words an attempt to fulfil one of the ideas of his master, Arnold-the circulation of a popular literature, cheaply supplied, and dealing with as wide a range of subjects as possible, in a Christian tone, but without sectarian or dogmatic bias-a fusion of the religious and the secular. The immense success of the experiment roused the wrath of the so-called religious press; and the vials of Pharisaic ill-will were opened by the Record, in a series of spiteful attacks on GOOD WORDS and its chief contributors.