NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12551, 19 April 1904, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

AN* IK-TERESTCNO CAREER.

Tm Most Rev. Robert Machray, Primate of All Canada, died at Winnipeg ou March 9. By his death (says the Loudon Times) the English Church in Greater Britain loses one of its most commanding figures and a worker of long experience and untiring activity. In 1902, while on a visit to England, the Archbishop developed symptoms of paralysis, and could only send a message to his synod, which was meeting that summer; but, in spite of his great weakness, the brave old man went back to his work, and in October, 1903, presided at the consecration of Dr. Matheson, the Dean of Rupert's Land, as assistant Bishop, jure successionis. Born in 1831, ho was the son of Mr. Robert Machray, advocate, of Aberdeen, and was a cousin of Sir Theodore Martin. He was educated at King's College, Aberdeen, where he gained the prizes for mathematics and natural and moral philosophy, and took ill' l M.A. degree in 1851. In that year he proceeded to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was elected first to a. foundation scholarship and later to the Taylor Scholarship, winning also college prizes in classics, mathematics, and Divinity, and for the Latin and the English essay. He graduated at Cambridge in 1855 its 34th Wrangler, and was soon after elected to a Fellowship, which ha held till his death. He was ordained deacon and priest in 1855 and 1856, on the title of his Fellowship, by the Bishop of Ely (Dr. Turton). When Dr. Anderson, in 1854, resigned the See of Rupert's Land, of which he became the first occupant in 1849, it was offered to Mr. Machray, then only 33 years of age, and was accepted by him. He was consecrated in Lambeth Palace chapel in Juno, 1865, and on reaching his enormous diocese he found colonial life in its most elementary stage. There were, indeed, a few thousand settlers on the Red River and on the Assiniboine; otherwise the diocese consisted of prairie and forest. Even in 1871 there were scarcely 300 people in the " city " ot Winnipeg, and the rest of the population consisted of roving tribes of Indians and the traders under the Hudson's Bay Company. When the Bishop first arrived there was neither a tailor nor a shoemaker in the country. It is therefore due largely to his wisdom and energy that the Anglican Church hi the North'West has developed on satisfactory and busi-ness-like lines. He gave the greatest attention to providing the apparatus of education; in fact, the education of the people in his province owes him an incalculable debt, for he organised and fostered it long before there was any Government department to take it in hand. He had been chairman of the Government Board of Public Education from its inception. Dr. Machray did much for the extension of the episcopate, and it lias been the lot of few men to leave nine bishoprics where they found one; and when the Canadian Synod in 1893. decided to have tvvc Archbishops ami a Priiptej it was not

\ merely ion the score of seniority-that Dr. > Machray was made Primate of All Canada ' and Archbishop of Rupert's Land. s In 1 3.893, besides made Archbishop, Dr. Mach- ; ray was apointed Prelate of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, an honour which - he richly deserved. It is one of the few diHtinctiolis of the sort that can fall to a '< bishop, and the Archbishop had the great' est possible influence on the development of * the Dominion. No colonist has worked more laboriously or been more loyal to the motherland, and the history 'of the Noi't-West Territory must always find a considerable space for his name and his work. It was in virtue of his high office in the Order of St. Michael and St, George that he was summoned to be present at the Coronation of the King, but, as already stated, he was seriously ill in London at the time, and could not be in his place in the Abbey. THE FBEXCH OFFICES. The typical French officer is often pictured as a light-hearted, inconsequent, dashing being, an inevitable something of the D'Artagnan about him, a something, perhaps, of Lovelace and Charles O'Malley, professional duties sitting lightly upon his shoulders and domestic •eaves being, unknown. Truer to life (says a writer in Chambers' Journal) is a. directly opposite portrait: that of a hard-worked, anxious father of a family, one to whom the most rigid economy is necessary, upon whom is laid the perpetual obligation of self-sacrifice, alike in small things and great. Nc class of French society more pre-eminently shines in the virtues of forethought and disinterestedness than the military ranks. But, no matter what the French officer's circumstances may be, he contrives to be hospitable. "With .what grace and cordiality, will lie do the honours of a station, however remotel How charmingly will drawbacks be got over! I well remember an incident illustrating the latter remark. : Many years ago I was travelling with four friends in Algeria. When we arrived at Teniet-el-Haad a captain to whom we had a letter of introduction carried us off to a hastilyimprovised dinner, his young wife gracefully doing the honours, and several fellow-officers and their ladies being invited to meet us. We were seated at table, and the Kabyle servant had just entered with the soup, when, by.an unlucky jerk, he tipped it oyer, everyone jumping up to avoid the steaming hot cascade. 'II fatit passer de notre pot-age alors' ('We must do without, the soup, then' )was all our host said, smiling as he spoke ; and with equal coolness and good-nature Hamet took his discomfiture. . Light-hearted, easy-going under trying circumstances, wedded to duty even when the path of duty leads not to glory but tc broken-down health and a frustrated career, the French officer is a type that does honour to France and its noble army."- ■■ ' ■" ' ' r " ■ ■'. ' I.V THE SIXTIES. Mr. Justin McCarthy, writing in Great Thoughts, states: —Palmerston and Lord John Russell were still rivals or colleagues; Brougham and Lyndhurst were still waking up the House of Lords by their curiously contrasted styles of eloquence; Gladstone had already achieved some of his most splendid financial triumphs; Cobden had accomplished a great commercial treaty with. France Bright was the foremost democratic orator in the House of Commons. Disraeli still held his place without a rival, as the brilliant leader of the Conservative party in the representative chamber, and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer was able to convince' the audiences in that same chamber that a writer of showy and fascinating novels might., notwithstanding the most serious defects of articulation, prove himself in, his later years a successful parliamentary orator. In literature our acknowledged leaders were Tennyson, Dickens, and Thackeray, but. Thackeray's life came to a close at a very early period of the sixties. Caxlylo was creating a school of thought and of letters all to himself, and John Stuart Mill was teaching us the principles o! political economy and of expanded political Liberalism. Robert Browning had not yet become the fashion,, and only by men and women of intellect was recognised as a great and genuine poet. Macaulay's career a3 essayist, historian, verse writer, and parliamentary debater had just come to an end. George Grote had still some years of noble work before. him, and although he never could be called a popular historian in the ordinary sense, his influence on the study I of history was inestimable. Maclise and Landseer were probably the most universally admired among painters at that time. The great singers of the opera houses— Garden and Her Majesty's—were Grisi, Alboni—Jenny Lind had ceased to sing on the operatic stage— Tamberlik, and Lablache. In the homes of the regular drama Charles Matthews, Charles Kean, the Keeleys, and Buxton were most popular, and Helen Faucit was recognised as the most successful actress in the Shakesperean drama. Macready had taken his final farewell of the English stage before the time with which our narrative.opens, and Frederick Robson had just begun to make himself famous in his short career as the creator of a style which .combined in original, fantastic, and unsurpassed fashion the elements of the broadly burlesque and the deeply tragic. sr.iPsnoD EKGfctSH. It used to be a commonplace in the theatrical profession that Shakespere spelt financial ruin for the stage, bub. Mr. Beerbohm Tree recently told the members of the Edinburgh Pen and Pencil Club, whose guest at supper he was, that his Shake- , sperean revivals had proved so remunerative that they had more than once saved him from those quicksands towards which the waters of modernity were fast sweeping him. Mr. Tree has a fine appreciation of the rolling, sonorous sentences of the Elizabethan poets and playwrights, and in his interesting speech he deplored a fall-ing-off in the " British" language of to-day. The power of speech, the exact appreciation of words, and the proper employment of the right and fitting phrase, he said, appeared well-nigh to have died out among us. " Even in Parliament ' good form' is to be careless and slipshod. We have become in oui speech, as perhaps in other respects, slipshod, slangy, and indistinct. Now, wnilo I quite admit, that slang is not without its distinct uses in its own proper time and place, I protest against the whole of our daily speech being couched in the narrow, slang of a decade or a locale. I - deprecate the mazy mumblings and the murmuring monotones of the preacher, the player, and the Parliamentarian. In practical life and in the world of art and literature indistinctness is absolutely criminal. Many a fine play has been killed by the indistinct utterance of the leading man. I know for a fact that bad speeches have lost more than one budding politician his chances of a seat in Parliament, while it is almost a truism to say that bad reading and bad preaching are infinitely more responsible for empty churches than any socalled decay of faith. I feel strongly, therefore, that the great necessity of the hour for him who would speak in public is that lip should learn the King's English, and learn it, too, from the purest sources. He cannot do so better than by a careful study of our great masters in literaure, among whom Shakespere, with bis superb blank/ •verse, easily stands first."