striking advantages, and the
failings that were imputed to him all leaned toward the side of success.
    One of his advantages was a fine person, which perhaps was even more
impressive at fifty-seven than it had been earlier in life. There were no
distinctively clerical lines in the face, no official reserve or ostentatious
benignity of expression, no tricks of starchiness or of affected ease: in his
Inverness cape he could not have been identified except as a gentleman with
handsome dark features, a nose which began with an intention to be aquiline but
suddenly became straight, and iron-grey hair. Perhaps he owed this freedom from
the sort of professional make-up which penetrates skin tones and gestures and
defies all drapery, to the fact that he had once been Captain Gaskin, having
taken orders and a diphthong but shortly before his engagement to Miss Armyn. If
any one had objected that his preparation for the clerical function was
inadequate, his friends might have asked who made a better figure in it, who
preached better or had more authority in his parish? He had a native gift for
administration, being tolerant both of opinions and conduct, because he felt
himself able to overrule them, and was free from the irritations of conscious
feebleness. He smiled pleasantly at the foible of a taste which he did not share
- at floriculture or antiquarianism for example, which were much in vogue among
his fellow-clergymen in the diocese: for himself, he preferred following the
history of a campaign, or divining from his knowledge of Nesselrode's motives
what would have been his conduct if our cabinet had taken a different course.
Mr. Gascoigne's tone of thinking after some long-quieted fluctuations had become
ecclesiastical rather than theological; not the modern Anglican, but what he
would have called sound English, free from nonsense: such as became a man who
looked at a national religion by daylight, and saw it in its relations to other
things. No clerical magistrate had greater weight at sessions, or less of
mischievous impracticableness in relation to worldly affairs. Indeed, the worst
imputation thrown out against him was worldliness: it could not be proved that
he forsook the less fortunate, but it was not to be denied that the friendships
he cultivated were of a kind likely to be useful to the father of six sons and
two daughters; and bitter observers - for in Wessex, say ten years ago, there
were persons whose bitterness may now seem incredible - remarked that the colour
of his opinions had changed in consistency with this principle of action. But
cheerful, successful worldliness has a false air of being more