The fact that the Bishop-Elect of Pretoria, the Rev. Neville Talbot, is no less than six feet six inches high, surpassing his predecessor by two inches, has been freely commented on in the Press. Anxious to ascertain from leaders of public opinion the true significance of the appointment, Mr. Punch has been at pains to collect their views. How divergent and even contradictory they are may be gathered from the following selection:—

Sir Martin Conway, the Apostle of Altitude, as he has been recently denominated, welcomed the appointment of Bishop Talbot as a good omen for the campaign which he is so ably conducting. "Nothing," he remarks, "has impressed me so much in the works of Tennyson as the line, 'We needs must love the highest when we see it.' Mountain or building or man, it is all the same. I never felt so happy in all my travels in South America as when I was in Patagonia, the home of tall men and the giant sloth. At all costs we should recognise and cultivate the human skyscraper."

The Bishop of Hereford (Dr. Hensley Henson) expressed the hope that the appointment of bishops would not be governed solely by an anthropometric standard. It would be a misfortune if the impression were created that preferment to the episcopal bench was confined to High Churchmen.

The Editor of The Times declined to dogmatize on the subject. He pointed out however that the average height of the Yugo-Slavs exceeded that of the Welsh. The claims of small nations could not, of course, be overlooked, but he considered it as little short of a calamity when a Great Power had an undersized Prime Minister. Short men liked short cuts, but, as Bacon said, the shortest way is commonly the foulest.

Dr. Robert Bridges (the Poet-Laureate) writes to say that, having given special study to the hexameter, he was much interested to find that the measure now in vogue amongst bishops was that of six feet and over. He hoped to treat the subject exhaustively in his forthcoming treatise on Ecclesiastical Prosody.

Colonel L. C. Amery, M.P., strongly deprecated the attempt to identify excessive height with extreme efficiency. In the election to Fellowships at All Souls no height limit was imposed. Napoleon and the late Lord Roberts were both small men, and he believed that the remarkable elusiveness displayed by Colonel Lawrence in the War was greatly facilitated by his diminutive stature. The testimony of literature throughout the ages was almost unanimous in its condemnation of giants. He had never heard of a small ogre. On the subject of Shakespeare's height he could not speak with assurance, but Keats was only just over five feet. Jumbomania, or the worship of mammoth dimensions, was a modern disease. Far better was the philosophy crystallised in such immortal sayings as "Love me little, love me long," and "Infinite riches in a little room."

Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, M.P., observed that, man being an imitative animal and bishops being regarded by many as good examples, there seemed to him a serious danger of an epidemic of what he might call Brobdingnagitis. Fortunately the results would not be immediately apparent, otherwise he would be compelled to raise his tariff for cheap suits. A rise of six inches in the average height of his customers would throw out all his calculations and eat up the modest margin of profit which he now allowed himself.