Canon Malcolm MacColl is an abbe with a difference.  No one eats his dinner more sociably or tells a story more aptly; no one enjoys good society more keenly or is more appreciated in it; but he does not make society a profession.  He is conscientiously devoted to the duties of his canonry; he is an accomplished theologian; and he is perhaps the most expert and vigorous pamphleteer in England.  The Franco-German War, the Athanasian Creed, the Ritualistic prosecutions, the case for Home Rule, and the misdeeds of the Sultan have in turn produced from his pen pamphlets which have rushed into huge circulations and swollen to the dimensions of solid treatises.  Canon MacColl is genuinely and ex animo an ecclesiastic; but he is a politician as well.  His inflexible integrity and fine sense of honour have enabled him to play, with credit to himself and advantage to the public, the rather risky part of the Priest in Politics.  He has been trusted alike by Lord Salisbury and by Mr. Gladstone; has conducted negotiations of great pith and moment; and has been behind the scenes of some historic performances.  Yet he has never made an enemy, nor betrayed a secret, nor lowered the honour of his sacred calling.

Miss Mabel Collins, in her vivid story of The Star Sapphire, has drawn under a very thin pseudonym a striking portrait of a clergyman who, with his environment, plays a considerable part in the social agreeableness of London at the present moment.  Is social agreeableness a hereditary gift?  Nowadays, when everything, good or bad, is referred to heredity, one is inclined to say that it must be; and, though no training could supply the gift where Nature had withheld it, yet a judicious education can develop a social faculty which ancestry has transmitted.  It is recorded, I think, of Madame de Stael, that, after her first conversation with William Wilberforce, she said:  “I have always heard that Mr. Wilberforce was the most religious man in England, but I did not know that he was also the wittiest.”  The agreeableness of the great philanthropist’s son—­Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester—­I discussed in my last chapter.  We may put aside the fulsome dithyrambics of grateful archdeacons and promoted chaplains, and be content to rest the Bishop’s reputation for agreeableness on testimony so little interested as that of Matthew Arnold and Archbishop Tait.  The Archbishop wrote, after the Bishop’s death, of his “social and irresistibly fascinating side, as displayed in his dealings with society;” and in 1864 Mr. Arnold, after listening with only very moderate admiration to one of the Bishop’s celebrated sermons, wrote:  “Where he was excellent was in his speeches at luncheon afterwards—­gay, easy, cordial, and wonderfully happy.”