LECTURE ON DEAN STANLEY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 8947, 3 August 1892, Page 6

LECTURE ON DEAN STANLEY.

A lecture was delivered in the Hall of the Y.M.C.A. yesterday evening by the Right Rev. Dr. Montgomery, Bishop of Tasmania, on " Reminiscences of the late Dean Stanley, of Westminster, and the Literary Men of the Day who were at the Deanery: Their Table Talk." There was a fair attendance, and the chair was taken by the Right Rev. Dr. Cowie, the lecture being in aid of the Native Pastorate Fund of the diocese of Auckland. The lecturer proceeded, in the course of an able and eloquent address, to sketch the Dean as he -had known him, and co give a description of the Deanery and its guests. The lecturer gave an account of the Dean's travels in Sinai and Palestine interspersed with many humourous anecdotes. Huxley, Green the historian, and Aruold were members of a literary circle of which Dean Stanley was the centre. The lecturer mentioned that Stanley had a sensitive ear tor rhythm in prose, he had a wretched ear for music, and could not distinguish between the iNational Anthem and Pop Goes the Weasel." Putting lluskin on one side, His Lordship considered that the three best prose writers of the century were three churchmen—Cardinal Newman, Dean Church, and Dean Stanley. If, as most people considered to be the case, the signs of literary merit were a bad handwriting and a carelessness about dress and food, then Dean Stanley was par excellence a literary man. „ The lecturer also recounted how Browning had just missed being reviewed by John Stuart Mill. On one occasion John Stuart Mill wrote to the editor of a certain magazine stating that he would like to review a book of poems by a certain anonymous writer and received the reply that the book had been already reviewed. Mill turned up the review and found the single word "Balderdash." "That," said Browning, "at the Deanery prevented my poems from being reviewed by Mill." Dean Stanley was fond of comparing Gladstone and Disraeli, and was wont to state that one point they had in common was that they were both utterly distrusted by their friends. At the close a vote of thanks was accorded the lecturer.