306 PKEBENDARY HINGESTON-RANDOLPh's REGISTERS. 



were remembered in tlie wills of people who had the advantage 

 of their office and service. Grandisson himself amongst his 

 almost endless legacies gave to every aquebajulus in Exeter 

 sixpence. 



But one moral seems written everywhere in the pages of 

 these dry Registers, and that is that history does not give up her 

 message nor reveal her meaning to the merely curious, or the 

 cynical, or the hunter- up of abuses. The abuses indeed to 

 which these Registers bear witness are legion, and they are quite 

 terrible. Even Rural Deans, the most modest of dignitaries, 

 were a terror not always to evil doers. Archdeacons and others, 

 in an ascending climax, ditto. " Pestilent apparitors " swooped 

 down upon the clergy, and lived upon them until paid to go 

 away. Men hardly in holy orders at all, Sub-Deacons at most, 

 were instituted to Rectories, and then allowed by the Bishop to 

 go to Oxford or to Paris for a year to study. Dr. Montague 

 James, in a chapter of the new Cambridge History projected by 

 Lord Acton, has been shewing how, long before the actual 

 Renaissance, signs were abroad that the new leaning was coming, 

 and it is an encouraging thought that, even if an imperfect 

 conscience in such matters suffered the Church to endure boy 

 Rectors, it was an abuse only, it was not indifference or godless- 

 ness. The young man is sent to where he can grow wiser, and 

 in many cases he does so. It would be comforting to set these 

 two facts, a reviving life in the universities, and a movement of 

 young divines thitherward, in relation one to the other. But 

 justice will not be done to Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph 

 unless those three volumes which cover the Episcopate of 

 Grandisson are read with care. Evidently their editor feels the 

 spell of that wonderful man's greatness, and delights to call 

 attention to the illustrations of it afforded by almost every page 

 of the Bishop's Register. He, at least, was no absentee, he 

 is always in his diocese. His early years are crowded with 

 various labours in things great and small. His letters are as 

 racy as Sydney Smith's, and as penetrating as St. Paul's. His 

 shrewdness is seen in his refusal to recognize the genuineness 

 of a miracle performed at his own Cathedral Church. His 

 letters on that occasion might have been at the bottom of 

 Shakespeare's "Miracle" of St. Alban's, in the second part of 



