not recall a single man eminently distinguished by a judicial type of speculative intellect on the English bench of bishops between Bishop Butler and Bishop Thirlvvall. It is to be regretted that Dr. Thirlwall never showed his great intellectual qualities in any field more popular than that of the history which he wrote in his earlier manhood, and the scattered charges and speeches of his later life. But none who read even the least interesting of these, or who conversed with him on the most superficial of intellectual questions, could doubt for a moment the genuinely speculative power of the mind with which they were in contact. Such a mind on the episcopal bench was unquestionably a sentinel where a sentinel was wanted. And if, on the whole, Dr. Thirlwall was somewhat more cautious than he need have been in warning his brethren against rash and hasty dogmatism, if it might be plausibly maintained that in one or two instances—notably, perhaps, in joining in the opposition to Sunday excursions—he found an excuse with which his colleagues would have had but a cold sympathy for joining in a popular movement, the mainspring of which he avowedly disapproved, unquestionably on all great occasions he stood up boldly against the "half-views of men and things," into which so many of his brethren not so much fell as eagerly rushed,—defending, for instance, the Bishop of Natal against the utterly unjudicial and unfair treatment of Bishop Gray, boldly condemning the "moral torture" to which the clergy were subjected when they were asked to sign the celebrated "Oxford Declaration," on pain of having imputed to them, if they refused, deficiency in "love to God and the souls of men," and openly expressing his dissatisfaction with the "burial service," not for always dwelling on the hope of resurrection to eternal life, but for the apparent irreverence of urging God "shortly to accomplish the number of his elect" and "to hasten his kingdom." Again, in the debate on the Irish Church Dr. Thirlwall dealt with the argument that the disendowment of a Church was sacrilege, in the spirit of a statesman, no less than in that of a wide-minded divine. And everything he did in this way had the judicial stamp on it. Hardly even the narrowest of his brethren would feel as easy in his dogmatism after Bishop Thirlwall had been heard in condemnation of it, as he was before.
No one would get an adequate insight into Bishop Thirlwall's mind who had not studied the singularly fine essay to which we have already referred, on "The Irony of Sophocles," an essay in which he evidently expressed not only thoughts which had struck him as a scholar in dwelling on the evolution of the literary plans of the greatest of the Greek dramatists, but also thoughts which had struck him as an historian in dwelling on the evolution of national destinies greater than any which human foresight had been able to conceive. They were thoughts, too, which undoubtedly entered deeply into his meditations on the theological subjects more especially brought under his consideration as a bishop. Dr. Thirlwall held, and his various writings illustrate, a very strong view of the appropriateness of the tone of irony to the higher moods of thought and feeling,—nay, even of its function in the development of all plans which are worked out through fragmentary and partial instruments, i.e., of all great plans, human and divine. "Where irony," he says, "is not merely jocular, it is not simply serious, but earnest. With respect to opinion, it implies a conviction so deep as to disdain a refutation of the opposite party. With respect to feeling, it implies an emotion so strong as to be able to command itself, and to suppress its natural tone in order to vent itself with greater force." And there are traces of both kinds of irony, the intellectual and the emotional, in his writings. But it is the judicial irony,—of which he speaks as the irony natural to a mind commanding both sides of a hotly-contested question,—which was most characteristic of him. "There is always a slight cast of irony," he says, "in the grave, calm, respectful attention impartially bestowed by an intelligent judge on two contending parties who are pleading their cases before him with all the earnestness of deep feeling;" and he goes on to explain that the irony of this attitude of mind consists in the almost inevitable conviction that both antagonists are right and both are wrong; that, with all their warmth, neither can be intellectually justified in the passion with which he maintains his exclusive point of view, even though it is the very onesidedness of that passion which could alone make good for him such ground as he eventually contrives to hold. This ironic judicial insight into the onesided machinery of even the best human passion and ac-
