appointed "our most trusted and wellbeloved councillor" the Lord Chancellor, and "our most dear cousins and councillors," or "our well-beloved and faithful councillors," naming the other Commissioners each peer doffing his hat at the mention of his name and title-to signify the Royal Assent by Commission to Bills. Then the Clerk of the Crown and the Clerk of the Parliaments take up positions, one on each side of the table. The Clerk of the Crown, standing on the Opposition side with a list of the Bills awaiting the Royal Assent, bows to the Commissioners and reads the title of the first Bill on his list. The Clerk of the Parliaments, standing on the Government side, then discharges his important duties in the ceremony. He first bows to the Commissioners, then turns and bows to Mr. Speaker and the Commons at the Bar, and declares to them the Royal Assent in the Norman French phrase, "Le roy le veult," or "The King wills it." The Bill has been transformed into an Act of Parliament. The Clerk of the Crown again bows to the Commissioners, reads the title of another Bill, bows once more, and again the Clerk of the Parliament bows first to the Commissioners, then to the Commons, and again declares "Le roy le veult." And so on till the list of Bills is exhausted.

There is, however, a change made now and then in the form of words in which the Clerk of the Parliaments announces the Royal Assent. If the measure be a private Bill, such as a Bill empowering a gas, or water, or railway company to extend its operations, he says: "Soit fait comme il est desire"; or should the Bill be one for granting subsidies to the Crown, he says: "Le roy remercie ses bon sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult."

If the Sovereign thought fit to refuse assent to a Bill-not because its provi

LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1676

sions were repugnant to him personally, but because he was advised to do so by his Ministers-the Clerk would declare it in the mild fashion of "Le roy avisera,” or “the King will consider it." But not since 1707, when Queen Anne withheld her aprpoval of a "Bill for the Militia of that part of Great Britain called Scotland," has this power of rejection been exercised by the Sovereign personally.

The use of Norman-French in this ceremony is a survival of the days long, long ago, when the Sovereign of Great Britain and Ireland was supposed to be the ruler also of France. The year 1707, in which, as we have seen, the Royal prerogative of refusing assent to a Bill was last exercised, was also remarkable for an attempt to establish by legislation the giving of the Royal Assent to Bills in the English tonguethe tongue in which Oliver Cromwell gave his assent to Bills passed during the Commonwealth. A Bill with that object in view was introduced in the House of Lords, passed through all its stages in that Chamber, and had reached its second reading in the House of Commons, when a dissolution of Parliament terminated its career. Curiously enough no attempt was ever afterwards made to revive it.

An Act comes into operation the moment the Royal Assent has been given, unless some time for the commencement of its operation is provided in the measure itself, which is usually the case; and accordingly the Clerk of the Parliaments is required to endorse on every Act, immediately after its title, the day, the month, and the year the Royal Assent was given to it.

Acts of Parliament are not proclaimed or promulgated in any way. They are printed "by authority" by the King's printers-which ensures their acceptance as correct in every court of justice. Two copies are specially printed on vellum. One is for preservation in

the Rolls of Parliament, deposited in the Victoria Tower, and is regarded as the official copy. The other is sent to the Record Office. But that is all that is done in the way of bringing Acts of Parliament under the notice of the King's subjects. Nevertheless, all subjects are bound to take note of the law. A violation of a statute is not extenuated by a plea of ignorance. The whole nation is, in strict constitutional The Monthly Review.

theory, present within the walls of the Palace of Westminister when the Estates of the Realm are engaged in the making of legislation. Therefore, an Act of Parliament requires no public notification in the country. In practice, of course, a subject finds it difficult to obtain entrance as a spectator to the Houses of Parliament; but of that little detail the Constitution takes no count.

Michael MacDonagh..

Probably it was with "mixed feelings" that Canon Ainger's friends first learned of the proposal to write his life; for it was a life lived, as he himself phrased it, in a backwater, out of the main stream of events, with no incidents but its books, read or written, its public and domestic pieties, and its friendships. A sketch, tenderly reminiscent, had been drawn by a life-long friend, the Master of Peterhouse, in the pages of Macmillan; and this had been supplemented by two brilliant studies of his social personality from the sympathetic pencil of Miss Edith Sichel. With these various impressions it might have been possible to rest content, leaving his pictures of other men, Lamb and Hood, with whom he had not a little in common, to be his own best memorial. However, it was thought right to attempt a more formal biography, and Miss Sichel undertook the task, and the result is before us.1

The first thing that strikes one about the portrait is the pains that have been spent upon it. It is less brilliantly effective than Miss Sichel's first sketches; but there is continuous evidence of research, and of the attempt to be just, especially to qualities less sympathetic to the artist than the social gifts

1 "The Life and Letters of Alfred Ainger." By Edith Sichel. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

which at first so strongly attracted her. In the next place I should like to express my conviction that the portrait is, in the main, a true one. Artists know by experience that, when people are shown portraits of their friends, their first comments are not in the key of praise. All Ainger's friends will probably make their distinguos here and there. But having done so, they will probably also agree that the picture could not, on the whole, have been better done. Here is a general sketch:

It was part of his charm that he contrived to unite so many paradoxes; mercurial and formal, fantastic and imbued with sharp common sense; he was a strange mixture of Ariel and of an eighteenth-century divine. Charitable he was more than most men, and almost as prejudiced as he was charitable; full of deep Christian humility, yet with such an eye for folly that his tongue often dealt in mordant satire. A lover of the obvious, but so fastidious that he sometimes seemed capricious or unjust; dependent on good company, and also a creature of moods, of formidable silences which none could break, till some chance word that took his fancy changed the weather, and the sun burst forth again.

is nothing so paradoxical as a child, if its actions are judged by the light of pure reason and not as the expressions of the temperament from which they proceed. Ainger had all a child's 'dependence upon surroundings and responsiveness to affection; not a little of its freakishness, and moodiness, and mercurial sensitiveness to spiritual weather; he had also a child's wholeheartedness in its likes and dislikes, and something of a child's frankness in giving expression to them; and at the centre he had a child's faith in goodness. It is not inconsistent with this to say, as was said of him in Cambridge days, that he was a "born man of the world." His manners in society were marked by a certain free formality and engaging candor, entirely unselfconscious, as of one who was prepared to be interested in the people he might meet; a refreshing contrast to a not unfamiliar type of literary lion who enters company with the air of a superior person who expects to be bored. Especially in this unself-consciousness and interest in his neighbors was he a contrast to most men who have histrionic talent. I remember once asking a Bencher of one of the Temples, now dead, whether he had ever seen Ainger act; and he replied, "I never saw him do anything else." The epigram, a reminiscence of Lamb's repartee to Coleridge, was probably irresistible, but it struck me at the time, apart from its cruelty, as one of the stupidest judgments I had ever come across; and experience only confirmed me in my opinion. Ainger was less preoccupied with himself than any other public man I knew, partly from his genuine interest in other people, partly from his habit framed in solitude of turning over in his memory the fine literature with which it was stored. When one met him on his regular journey from

the Temple to the Athenæum it was possible to tell from the movement of his lips or the toss of his hand that he was busy with some favorite passage, or possibly maturing some bon mot. It is not a little interesting to find him recommending to actors, as a cure for the besetting foible of their profession, the practice of going into ordinary society and taking "a friendly and wholesome part in the common interests of the world." The times when he thought of his dignity were occasions when he considered it attacked, as when foolish hostesses, who knew his powers, tried to get him to exhibit them for the entertainment of their company. He was extremely resentful when some good-natured friend mentioned his histrionic gifts at a dinner at which the King, then Prince of Wales, was present. He thought, and with good reason, that a Chaplain to the Queen should not be represented in an undignified light before the heir to the throne. He was fond of the observation that the world prefers to label a man according to his lowest title to distinction, especially if that title be jocular and his profession a serious one.

But I am forgetting Miss Sichel, which is, perhaps, the greatest compliment a reader of her book can pay her. I should like, all the same, to remark upon the skill with which she has woven into her narrative, especially in the early chapters where she could not speak from personal knowledge, the reminiscences of this and another friend, instead of leaving them, after the fashion of some modern biographers, side by side, in great slabs, like a series of cemetery monuments. Biographical details are kept in due subordination to their relevancy to character. The portrait of Ainger's father, architect of the old University College Hospital, shows us whence the son inherited the twinkle in the eyes and the

humorous mouth; while the two delightful photographs of Ainger himself, one labelled "in youth," the other "at eighteen years of age" (though they seem to present him in the same suit of clothes), give us the other side of his character, the thoughtful boy in process of being shaped into the devoted minister of the Gospel by the sermons of Frederick Maurice at Lincoln's Inn Chapel. After spending some years at a private school Ainger attended classes at King's College, London, where he made Maurice's acquaintance and fell under his spell; the other formative influence he found there, to which he was never tired of making acknowledgment, was that of Professor Brewer. There, too, he laid the foundations of several lifelong friendships; with Mr. Horace Smith, poet and magistrate; Mr. R. C. Browne, best known for his edition of Milton; and (though the biographer does not record the fact) with the present Dean of Canterbury. From King's College Ainger went to Trinity Hall, where he read first mathematics, and then law; but his letters show that his real interests lay then, where they remained always, in religion and literature. After his ordination he spent four years as curate at Alrewas in Staffordshire, then he became an assistant master at the Collegiate School, Sheffield; finally, in 1866, exchanging the post for the Readership at the Temple Church, which he held for twentysix years, when he retired, and after a brief interval succeeded Dr. Vaughan as Master.

To most Londoners of the last generation, Ainger and the Temple were inseparable terms. He seemed an incarnation of the genius loci. And the natural congruity between the two was increased by Ainger's devotion to the memory of Charles Lamb, who, so far as the reading public was concerned, was more identified with the historic walks and buildings than any Bencher

of the two honorable societies who ever lived. And certainly there was much in the associations of the place, and much more in the services of the Church, characteristically "Church of England," and by good fortune served by organists of genius, which appealed to his taste and affection. But his friends knew that the pre-established harmony which outsiders found so convincing did not appeal so strongly to himself. One or two letters published in this volume even name the post that represented the haven of his ambition. It was a Canonry at Westminister! The discovery is to me, naturally, not a little pathetic, and also not a little amusing, as I for long had cherished a similar sentiment about the Mastership of the Temple. If it is asked what it was in his position at the Temple that was unsatisfactory to him, the answer would be that there were several things. For one he had been there twenty-six years as Reader before Lord Rosebery offered him the Mastership; and everybody is the better for an occasional shift. Then, little as he cared for the exercise of authority, it irked him that he had no voice at all in the arrangement of the services. He was there by the authority of the Crown, but by the sufferance of the Benchers, and under the circumstances, the title of Master, i.e. Warden, did not please him, and he would never use it. Then, again, he came to realize that some of the members found his sermons too much of an essay, and lacking in unetion, as compared with his predecessor's, while some of the younger men vexed him by pressing for services on week-days, which, when he had made the necessary arrangements, they did not attend. Others again resented the three months' residence at Bristol to which his Canonry obliged him. There were drawbacks, as it happened, even to that piece of preferment, much as he valued and enjoyed it; and enjoyed

the friendship of the warm-hearted people there; for the climate suited him ill, and as the old canon's houses in the cathedral close have long ago made way for business premises, a residentiary has to spend most of his morning and afternoon in walking down from Clifton to the Cathedral services and back again. I think it right to mention these things, because as the biography prints one or two letters expressing the wish for a change of position, and does not explain why Ainger desired the change, the impression might be conveyed that he was of a dissatisfied temper.

The Canoury at Bristol came to him in the Jubilee year 1887, when he was fifty; two years previously Glasgow had awarded him an honorary LL.D.; and in 1892 his "picture" appeared in Vanity Fair, which is perhaps the blue ribbon in England of general distinction. After being caricatured, a literary man, who is already a member of the Athenæum, has nothing left to hope for in the way of recognition-nor has a popular preacher, who has already been "selected" to preach before his University. Ainger had received both these tributes. In 1889 he lectured for the first time at the Royal Institution, a distinction which he enjoyed as much as any that came to him. And, indeed, it would be true to say that he excelled as a lecturer more than as a preacher, because he felt freer to bring more of his personality into play. About the substance of his lectures Miss Sichel speaks with a great effort to be fair. They have been recently criticized, in their published form, by almost every newspaper in England, so that I need say nothing about them here. I am relieved to find, from letters that Miss Sichel gives, that Ainger himself contemplated publishing them. Perhaps I may explain here, what I could not explain in the preface to the collected essays without indiscretion,

I

why the paper on "The New Hamlet"i.e., Irving's Hamlet-was omitted. had edited it with the necessary freedom, and it was already printed in the volume, when it was discovered that Sir Henry Irving, with a wise prescience, had secured from a member of the publishing firm the promise that it should not be reprinted. I had some correspondence about it with Sir Henry Irving and tried to get him to consent to a still further castigation of the article, which I wished to preserve for the sake of its study of the character, even more than for its criticism of the actor. Quite naturally and justifiably Sir Henry preferred to stand upon the promise made to him, and as he had a recollection that Ainger had told him he was ashamed of the article, I had no choice but to withdraw it. In the event, before the volume appeared. Sir Henry Irving had died and been laid to rest in the Abbey.

Two chapters in Miss Sichel's book that are likely to receive a good deal of attention in the evening newspapers are those on Ainger's humor and on his relations with Du Maurier. From the latter the reader discovers how much of his enjoyment of Punch in what Miss Sichel, a little unkindly calls "its palmy days," was due to the regular supply of material furnished by the literary man to the artist. In the former chapter the biographer has done her best to break the effect of a mere catalogue of bon mots by relating Ainger's humor to other qualities in him, and pointing out how he used his wit to convey serious criticism. The plea that "among the many sayings of Canon Ainger we cannot recall one which is unkind" seems to require some modification in face of the lines on the late Mr. Haweis's baby quoted on the opposite page. The nonsense verses that follow on the person "who couldn't read Crockett's Cleg Kelly" were not Ainger's but Mr. E. V. Lucas's. They took