It is related of Frederick Temple, when he was Bishop of London, that he offered two shillings to a cabman who had brought him from somewhere near Piccadilly to Fulham Palace. The cabman looked at the Bishop more in sorrow than in anger. “Would St. Porl,” he asked, “if he were alive now, treat a poor man like that?” “No,” said Temple, “if St. Paul were alive he would be at Lambeth, and the fare there is only a shilling.”

The wit and the philosophy were equally characteristic of the gnarled old man who, at a time of life when most people are fit only for the chimney corner, was still regarded as the strongest prelate on the Bench. Wit, the wit of the peasant rather than of the courtier—and there is no more authentic variety—Dr. Temple had in full measure; there was something reminiscent of Swift in the homely shrewdness of his judgments, and in the terse vigour with which he expressed them. The peasant predominated also in his philosophy; the Rugby boy who delivered the famous opinion that he was “a beast, but a just beast,” was probably not conscious how very right the description was. Temple had eminently the peasant’s sense of what was due from as well as to him. He was spiritual kinsman to that Scottish gardener in Mr. Chesterton’s tale who, being bequeathed “all the gold of the Ogilvies,” took it all, to the very stopping in the testator’s teeth, but left everything else. That manner which many found repellent was not the manner of a really harsh man; Temple could feel deeply, and the sobs that convulsed him when he heard of Archbishop Benson’s sudden death were the authentic heralds of a warm heart. But he had Dr. Johnson’s impatience of “foppish complaints,” of unmeaning compliments, of the little graces that matter so much with the ordinary run of men and women. Of work well and truly done he was sufficiently appreciative, but only sufficiently; after all, good work was the thing to expect, and why make a fuss about it? When people who had no right expressed appreciation of himself he snapped savagely. A courtly Rector once expressed the fear that his lordship must be very tired after such long and self-sacrificing exertions. “Not more tired than a man ought to be,” barked Temple. A careful Vicar remonstrated with him for standing so long bare-headed under a blazing sun. “My skull is thicker than yours,” was the only reply. Above all, he hated anything suggesting professional “gush.” At the laying of the foundation-stone of a new church a clergyman with tendencies that way remarked on the pleasure it must be to him to take part in ceremonies so eloquent of the extending scope of the Church in his diocese. “Not at all,” retorted Temple, “at these affairs I get nothing but cold lamb and ‘The Church’s One Foundation,’ and I’m tired of both.” Though a connoisseur in vintages, he gave up the use of wine simply in order to make easier his task as a temperance-worker; but this self-immolation (and he would have snarled at anybody who praised it as such) made him only the more acid at the expense of men who seemed to him to talk exaggerated nonsense about teetotalism as the foundation of all the virtues.

The truth was that Temple, though of good blood, was himself half a peasant, and was full of that impatience with any kind of pretence which comes of close contact with the soil. He had all the peasant’s pride, together with all the peasant’s contempt for what they call in the country “mucky pride.” Himself master of a pure and masculine style, he detested all floridity of speech. To the end of his life his manners were a little rustic, and he retained that sense of economy (having no necessary relation to meanness) which is inborn in most country people above the station of the labourer and below that of the landlord; when Primate of All England he munched his bun and sipped his milk at a tea-shop with the more satisfaction for the consciousness that they cost only twopence; the “tip” he would omit. Curiously enough, this most English of men was born on soil always Hellenic, and now officially Greek. Thirteenth of the fifteen children of an infantry officer who had been appointed Resident of Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Isles, Temple grew up to speak modern Greek and Italian as fluently as his mother tongue. His father, able and upright, but of explosive temper, came originally from the North Country, and belonged to a branch of that Temple family which, first made illustrious by the husband of Dorothy Osborne and the patron of Swift, has given so many statesmen to England. The mother of the future Archbishop was a Cornish woman by blood and a Puritan by habit and tradition, frugal, pious, authoritative, and immensely capable. She taught Frederick till he was twelve; and, though she knew no Latin, and had no notion of the low cunning of Euclid, she managed to give him a very fair grounding in these and other subjects. The only drawback of this queer kind of instruction was that the boy was left to his own devices in the matter of quantities, and years afterwards the masters at Blundell’s were horrified by his barbaric pronunciation of the polished tongue of Virgil. After his retirement from the Ionian Islands, the paternal Temple bought a small farm in Devonshire, but he could not make it pay, and was forced to take a small appointment in West Africa, where he died. His widow did her best with the farm and a small pension, and young Temple learned how to “muck out” pigsties, to handle stock, and, above all, to plough; years after he could boast that he could draw as straight a furrow as any man in Cornwall, and when as an undergraduate he applied for admission to a Chartist meeting he was allowed to pass the barrier on the testimony of his hands; they were those of an indubitable manual worker.

Mere hard work and hard living, however, fail to embitter a lad of healthy mind and body who is conscious of a creditable past and ambitious of a better future. Temple could bear with stoicism the regimen of dry bread which the poverty of the family compelled. The only severe wound was to his pride. “I think the thing that pinched me most,” said Temple long afterwards, “was to wear patched clothes and patched shoes.” But even this does not seem to have weighed much; his character was sturdy and his spirits were high; and the picture we have of him at Blundell’s is by no means that of the self-conscious poor scholar. Not only was he a hearty player and fighter, but (on the authority of the head-master) “the most impudent boy that ever lived”; and the abounding health of his mind is proved by his detestation of Swiss Family Robinson—“a hateful book,” he calls it, “the liars were so lucky.” At Balliol, where he went with a scholarship, life was hard; he had no fire in his room even in the depth of winter, and was known to read under the light of the hall lamp because he had no oil for his own. The Tractarian movement was then at its climax; Newman was preaching the last of his sermons at St. Mary’s before his conversion to the ancient Church. But Temple seems to have kept his head surprisingly amid all this ferment; he had in truth, throughout life, something of that calm outlook on religion which struck young Esmond in Master Thomas Tusher. He believed in Christianity much as a sound business man believes in double entry, but with conviction there was no emotion. No man dreamed fewer dreams, partly, no doubt, because few men did harder work; work kills dreaming, for good as well as for ill. Outwardly there was little to distinguish Temple from those great pagans of the eighteenth century who nearly made the Church in England what the Church in Ireland actually became. But he had somewhere hidden under the harsh husk of rationalism a little of that wistfulness which one notes in so many of the nineteenth-century clergy; the thing is best described by referring to Kingsley’s anxiety to be with the earliest authorities in theology and the latest authorities in science. In his earlier life, naturally enough, the tendency to modernism was most marked. Temple’s orthodoxy was called into question over his contribution to Essays and Reviews, but there seems no reason to suppose that he departed far from the straight path, and those who have survived to hear most of the great Christian dogmas attacked in conspicuous Church pulpits find inexplicable on purely doctrinal grounds the storm which broke when Mr. Gladstone offered Temple the See of Exeter.

In a wider sense, perhaps, there was a more rational basis for the outcry. For Temple, with all his good and great qualities, was too little of the mystic to appeal to those who regarded the Church as something above and beyond a useful (or even indispensable) organisation. His sense of professional duty was high, but his mind was eminently that of a practical man of affairs, and he would probably have acted more wisely, in other interests as well as his own, if he had remained in the scholastic work to which the earlier part of his life was devoted. When he went to Exeter Temple had behind him a great record as an educational bureaucrat, and a still greater record as head-master of Rugby. But he had never served as a parish priest; his disposition was aloof, his temper autocratic, his manner rugged, his voice harsh and rasping; he had little imagination, and the quality of his mind fitted him more for politics, for high finance, for law, or even for soldiering than for the duties of a Christian high priest. A great spiritual leader in the full sense Temple could never have been. But he “made good” as a Bishop as he had “made good” as a head-master, and in much the same way. His diocese became a well-managed school, and his clergy were put in their places much like the boys of Rugby; some, perhaps, regarded him as a “beast,” none could call him other than a “just beast” and an energetic one. With the laity he had a certain popularity, partly because he was severe on any sacerdotal eccentricities that annoyed them, partly because with ordinary people he was more prone to unbend than with his professional brethren. He was at his very easiest in dealing with boys.

The translation to London, after fifteen years in the West, came in the natural course of events, and the Nineties found Temple well established at Fulham. He was now an old man, but his power of work was as little diminished as the angularity of his character. In a single year he would answer about ten thousand letters, perhaps a third of them in his own hand; the meetings he attended averaged more than one a day; he held seventy or eighty confirmations and ordained a hundred and fifty priests annually, and yet found time for services and addresses for nearly every day of the year. The masculine strength of his mind, the beautiful simplicity of his life, won admiration, but Archbishop Benson had often to deplore the want of that “little more” which would have been so much in his old friend and ex-principal. “He will not say or do,” he laments, at the time of the dockers’ strike, “one thing with the idea that men should think well of him.” “It is very painful,” he says again, in 1891, “very painful, to see the Lords so unappreciative of the Bishop of London—the strongest man nearly in the House, the clearest, the highest-toned, the most deeply sympathetic, the clearest in principle—yet because his voice is a little harsh and his accent a little provincial (though of what province it is hard to say), and his figure square and his hair a little rough, and because all this sets off the idea of his independence, he is not listened to at all by the cold, kindly, worldly-wise, gallant, landowning powers.” The Archbishop was a little cross because during the dockers’ strike Cardinal Manning managed to figure much more largely than Temple in the public eye. But this was something like blaming Darwin because he was not Sir Henry Irving. Temple was Temple, and Manning was Manning; and, if Manning was wise to be always Manning, Temple was certainly wise to be always Temple. A histrionic or diplomatic Temple is something from which the very imagination recoils. And, after all, the gentle Archbishop’s repinings were hardly justified. The kind of worth which Temple represented rarely wins enthusiasm, but it seldom fails to gain respect. To suggest that Temple made any real impression on the great pagan capital would be absurd; like everybody else who has been called for generations to the See of London he was mocked by the gigantic hopelessness of his task. Before London can be made Christian it must be made human, and, though Londoners remain very human, London had long ceased to be so. “London,” says an admirer, “expected in Temple a man of grit and steel, and so it found him.” London, of course, expected nothing, and was in no way disappointed; it was little more concerned with his coming than with the appointment of a new magistrate at Bow Street, and little more concerned with his departure than with the retirement of a Lord Mayor. To London as London—London, just as ignorant of the men who make its laws as of the men who tear up its pavements—Temple was exactly nothing. To a great many people in London he was a name, and to a great many more a character. To only a tiny fraction of London was he anything else. But here, as at Exeter, he “made good” in the narrower sense. He organised and energised, wisely stirred up some dogs which had slept in his predecessor’s time, still more wisely administered soothing syrup to other dogs too emphatically awake, put down his foot in some small matters, kept it discreetly poised in some big ones, and imparted to all who worked under him something of his own single-mindedness and passion for work.

He was seventy-six when he removed to Lambeth, and could save a shilling on his cab fare. “I have still five years’ work in me,” he said to a friend after he had accepted Lord Salisbury’s offer of the Primacy, and the forecast was almost exact; he died before he had completed his sixth year as Archbishop. The work was hardly new to him; for years he had been Archbishop Benson’s chief adviser, and the change was more one of form than of substance. The duties of the highest ecclesiastical office were carried through in the same spirit as those which had gone before; in spite of failing powers the indomitable old man did all that presented itself as his proper work, and, like the patron of Gil Blas, refused to recognise that the same Time which had now reduced him to a rebellious invalidism had had some effect on his sturdy intelligence. He outlived both the century and the great Queen; it actually fell to him, born under George IV, to crown Edward VII, and, like Chatham, he was addressing the House of Lords when he sank under the blow which within a few days ended his life.

On the broad current of the national life at the beginning of a bustling new reign, the news of his death caused but a momentary ripple. But far outside the limits of his own Church and circle there were not wanting men who felt that a figure had been removed that left none to vie with it in its rugged and lonely majesty. It was not a time of popularity for the typical Victorian virtues. It stood to the age that had passed somewhat as the Regency did to the last phase of the reign of Louis XIV. But those who read at the close of 1902 the record of the full and fine life that had begun eighty-one years earlier could only admit that the age must have been great in which Temple after all never reached quite the first rank.