Mr. Bright once said, with characteristic downrightness, “If I was paid what a bishop is paid for doing what a bishop does, I should find abundant cause for merriment in the credulity of my countrymen;” and, waiving the theological animus which the saying implies, it is not uncharitable to surmise that a general sense of prosperity and a strong faculty of enjoying life in all its aspects and phases had much to do with Bishop Wilberforce’s exuberant and infectious jollity.  “A truly emotional spirit,” wrote Matthew Arnold, after meeting him in a country house, “he undoubtedly has beneath his outside of society-haunting and men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest for the other.”

A scarcely less prominent figure in society than Bishop Wilberforce, and to many people a much more attractive one, was Dean Stanley.  A clergyman to whom the Queen signed herself “Ever yours affectionately” must certainly be regarded as the social head of his profession, and every circumstance of Stanley’s nature and antecedents exactly fitted him for the part.  He was in truth a spoiled child of fortune, in a sense more refined and spiritual than the phrase generally conveys.  He was born of famous ancestry, in a bright and unworldly home; early filled with the moral and intellectual enthusiasms of Rugby in its best days; steeped in the characteristic culture of Oxford, and advanced by easy stages of well-deserved promotion to the most delightful of all offices in the Church of England.  His inward nature accorded well with this happy environment.  It was in a singular degree pure, simple, refined, ingenuous.  All the grosser and harsher elements of human character seemed to have been omitted from his composition.  He was naturally good, naturally graceful, naturally amiable.  A sense of humour was, I think, almost the only intellectual gift with which he was not endowed.  Lord Beaconsfield spoke of his “picturesque sensibility,” and the phrase was happily chosen.  He had the keenest sympathy with whatever was graceful in literature; a style full of flexibility and colour; a rare faculty of graphic description; and all glorified by something of the poet’s imagination.  His conversation was incessant, teeming with information, and illustrated by familiar acquaintance with all the best that has been thought and said in the world.

Never was a brighter intellect or a more gallant heart housed in a more fragile form.  His figure, features, bearing, and accent were the very type of refinement; and as the spare figure, so short yet so full of dignity, marked out by the decanal dress and the red ribbon of the Order of the Bath, threaded its way through the crowded saloons of London society, one felt that the Church, as a civilizing institution, could not be more appropriately represented.