[28] No biography of Lord Cairns has (so far as I know) appeared--a singular fact, considering the brilliancy of his career, and considering the tendency which now prevails to bestow this kind of honour on many persons of the second or even the third rank. One reason may be that Cairns, great though he was, never won personal popularity even with his own political party or among his contemporaries at the bar, and was to the general public no more than a famous name.
[29] The reign of King Richard the First.
James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester from 1870 till 1885, was born in Gloucestershire, of a Scottish family, in 1818, and died at Manchester in 1885.[30] He took no prominent part in ecclesiastical politics, and no part at all in general politics. Though a sound classical scholar in the old-fashioned sense of the term--he won the Ireland University Scholarship at Oxford, then and still the most conspicuous prize in the field of classics--he was not an exceptionally cultivated man, and he never wrote anything except official reports and episcopal charges. Neither was he, although a ready and effective speaker, gifted with the highest kind of eloquence. Neither was he a profound theologian. Yet his character and career are of permanent interest, for he created not merely a new episcopal type, but (one may almost say) a new ecclesiastical type within the Church of England.
Till some sixty or seventy years ago the normal English bishop was a rich, dignified, and rather easy-going magnate, aristocratic in his tastes and habits, moderate in his theology, sometimes to the verge of indifferentism, quite as much a man of the world as a pastor of souls. He had usually obtained his preferment by his family connections, or by some service rendered to the court or a political chief--perhaps even by solicitation or intrigue. Now and then eminence in learning or literature raised a man to the bench: there were, for instance, the "Greek play" bishops, such as Dr. Monk of Gloucester, whose fame rested on their editions of the Attic dramatists; and the _Quarterly Review_ bishops, such as Dr. Copleston, of Llandaff, whose powerful pen, as well as his wise administration of the great Oxford College over which he long presided, amply justified his promotion. So even in the eighteenth century the illustrious Butler had been Bishop of Durham, as in Ireland the illustrious Berkeley had been Bishop of Cloyne. But, on the whole, the bishops of our grandfathers' days were more remarkable for their prudence and tact, their adroitness or suppleness, than for intellectual or moral superiority to the rest of the clergy. Their own upper-class world, and the middle class which, in the main, took its view of English institutions from the upper class, respected them as a part of the solid fabric of English society, but they were a mark for Radical invective and for literary sneers. Their luxurious pomp and ease were incessantly contrasted with the simplicity of the apostles and the poverty of curates, and the abundance among them of the gifts that befit the senate or the drawing-room was compared with the rarity of the graces that adorn a saint. The comparison was hardly fair, for saints are scarce, and a good bishop needs some qualities which a saint may lack.