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at the Vyne, Gray having preceded him five years before. How keenly Walpole felt the loss of his Hampshire friend is shown in the following letter, which he wrote to Mann on the day that followed it, and which is expressed in a style more natural and indicative of sincerity than most of his studied compositions:

'It is a heavy blow, but such strokes reconcile one to parting with this pretty vision, life; what is it when one has no longer those to whom one speaks as confidentially as to one's own soul? Old friends are the great blessing of one's latter years; half a word conveys one's meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking. Mr. Chute and I agreed invariably in our principles; he was my counsel in my affairs, was my oracle in taste, the standard to whom I submitted my trifles, and the genius that presided over poor Strawberry. His sense decided me in everything; his wit and quickness illuminated everything. I saw him oftener than any man; to him in any difficulty I had recourse; and him I loved to have here, as our friendship was so entire, and we knew one another so entirely, that he alone was never the least constraint to me. We passed many hours together without saying a syllable to each other, for we were both above ceremony. I left him without excusing myself, read or wrote before him as if he were not present. Alas! alas! and how self presides even in our grief! I am lamenting myself, not him! No; I am lamenting my other self. Half is gone, the other remains solitary. Age and sense will make me bear my afflictions with submission and composure; but for ever-that little for ever that remains -I shall miss him.'

After describing his friend's last hours, he continues:

'The vigour of his mind was as strong as ever; his power of reasoning clear as demonstration; his rapid wit astonishing as at forty, about which time you and I knew him first. Even the impetuosity of his temper was not abated, and all his humane virtues had but increased with his age. He was grown sick of the world; saw very few persons; submitted with unparalleled patience to all his sufferings; and in five and thirty years I never once saw or heard him complain of them, nor, passionate as he was, knew him fretful. . . . Don't wonder I pour out my heart to you; you know how faithfully true is all I say of him. My loss is most irreparable. To me he was the most faithful and secure of friends and a most delightful companion.'

With the death of Walpole's friend, the male line of the Chute family became extinct. By his will the estate passed to his cousin, Thomas Lobb, who, assuming the name of Chute in addition to his own, married the daughter of Thomas Wiggett, mayor of Norwich. The son of this couple, William John Chute, succeeded to the Vyne in 1790, and sat in Parliament for Hants; but owed his chief distinction to the fact of his having established and kept at his own

expense, till his death in 1824, that well-known pack the Vine hounds, which still exists and bears the old name, though modernised in spelling. At the Vyne may now be seen a picture of New Forest Jasper, a fine hound, one of the sires of the pack. William Chute used to say that as great families have the portrait of their distinguished ancestor, the judge, or the general, or the statesman, in their rooms, he did not see why the dogs should not have ' their family picture also.' At the back of the picture are the lines written by himself. The M.F.H. had not forgotten his Latinity, though a little weak in his prosody :-

'Hic benè apud memores veteris stat gloria gentis,

Hinc plus quàm solito robore vulpes eget.'

The hounds usually hunted five times in a fortnight, and were never advertised; even those who hunted with them could not always learn the next day's meet till late in the afternoon. It depended upon the work done and the number of hounds cut by flints whether they would hunt twice or thrice in the week. Half-crowns were collected for the men whenever the fox was killed after a fair run. The men wore round hats and long scarlet coats which would lap over and defend their knees against wet or cold. The huntsman carried a small twisted bugle slung over his shoulder. The first Duke of Wellington, after he came to Strathfieldsaye in 1817, became an active member of the hunt. The following letter from him to William Chute has been preserved:

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Strathfield Saye, March 23, 1820. 'My dear Sir, I went out this morning to meet your hounds, having ordered my horses to Clarken Green, as I had settled with your huntsman. I went on as far as Dean, but could not find my groom, and I then returned to Clarken Green, thinking it probable that he had gone to the covert side. From Clarken Green I went to Ebbworth, and not finding or hearing anything of you or my horses I have returned home. I regret this exceedingly, particularly as I feel you will have waited for me. I shall be much obliged if you will let me know on what days and at what places you will go out next week.

Ever yours most faithfully,

'WELLINGTON.'

A picture of a meet of the Vine hounds, in which the Duke appears as a prominent figure, was painted in 1843. William Chute was not a mere fox-hunting squire, but a man of marked individuality and independence of character, and some eccentric habits which he indulged in rather added to than detracted from the consideration in which he was held

in his neighbourhood. An animated description of the wellknown squire and sportsman is given by his friend the late Rev. E. Austen Leigh, vicar of Bray.

'I wish,' he writes, 'I could make others see him as I can fancy that I see him myself, trotting up to the meet at Freefolk Wood or St. John's, sitting rather loose on his horse, and his clothes rather loose upon him, the scarlet coat flapping open, a little whitened at the collar by the contact of his hair-powder and the friction of his pigtail, the frill of his shirt above, and his gold watch-chain and seal below, both rather prominent; the short knee-breeches scarcely meeting the boottops. See! he rides up, probably with some original amusing remark, at any rate with a cheerful greeting, to his friends, a nod or a kindly word to the farmer, and some laughing notice of the schoolboy on his pony. Or I could give quite a different picture of him in his parish church, standing upright, tilting his heavy folio Prayer Book on the edge of his high pew, so that he had to look up rather than down on it. There he stands, like Sir Roger de Coverley, giving out the responses in an audible voice, with an occasional glance to see what tenants are at church and what schoolboys are misbehaving, and I am sorry to add sometimes, when the rustic psalmody began its discord in the gallery, with a humour which even church could not restrain, making some significant gesture to provoke a smile from me and other young persons in the pew.'

William John Chute twice contested the county of Hants, and sat for it in two Parliaments. Dying without issue in 1824, he bequeathed the Vyne estate to a brother who never married, and with him the male line of the Chutes having become extinct, the estate passed by devise to William Lyde Wiggett, a cousin of the mother of the last two proprietors, who assumed the arms and name of Chute. This gentleman enlarged the old mansion and enriched it with some valuable works of art. He also greatly improved the cultivation of his estate, and bestowed a much-needed attention upon the roads in the neighbourhood of the Vyne, which, previously to his accession, had been little better than driftways, impassable beyond the mansion except by carts and wagons; so that it was a common saying that the Vyne was the last place upon the earth, and that Beaurepaire (the adjoining property of the Brocas family) was beyond it. Horace Walpole humorously said that the Vyne must be approached ' upon stilts,' and that no post but a dove could come from it.' Mr. Chaloner William Chute, eldest son of the lastnamed owner, is the present proprietor of the Vyne, and author of the volume of which a brief outline has now been given.

ART. III.-The Holy Bible according to the Authorised Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary by Clergy of the Anglican Church. Apocrypha. Edited by HENRY WACE. 2 vols. 8vo. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1888.

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MUCH ingenious disquisition has been expended on the word Apocrypha,' as well as on its appropriateness as a title for the deutero-canonical books of the Old Testament. As our readers are aware, the word means 'hidden' or secret,' but as to the quality that is hidden, or the reason that prompted or justified the secrecy, we are left in an impenetrable obscurity of which the term is no unfitting designation. Failing an obvious solution of what is in name and reality a riddle, critics of all ages have exercised their ingenuity on the point by more or less auspicious guesses. What is hidden in the Apocrypha, said some of the early Fathers, is an esoteric lore like that which the Gnostic sects claimed to possess, and to which the incom. municable secrets of the Greek mysteries furnished an obvious analogy. They are called hidden, said St. Augustine, because their origin was not clear to the Fathers,' and because they are manifested by no light of testimony." Probably this opinion, which Augustine shared with the chief of the Latin Fathers, helped to suggest the transference of the word from the sense of hidden to that of spurious or adulterated. St. Jerome, as the leading Biblical critic among the Western Fathers, is explicit enough on this point. Giving a lady instruction in Bible reading, he says:† 'Caveat "omnia Apocrypha: et si quando ea non ad dogmatum ' veritatem sed ad signorum reverentiam legere voluerit, 'sciat non eorum esse quorum titulis prænotantur multaque his admixta vitiosa, et grandis esse prudentiæ aurum in 'luto quærere.' Augustine is in full accord with Jerome as to the adulterate quality of the Apocryphal books, though he does not enter his caveat as to the great discretion needed for groping successfully for gold in mire. In his autem Apocryphis etsi invenitur aliqua veritas, tamen propter 'multa falsa, nulla est canonica auctoritas.' On which *De Civitate Dei, xv. 23; c. Faust. xi. 2.

Epistles, 107. Dr. Salmon, in his introduction, says that he does not understand the words 'signorum reverentiam;' but the meaning is clear. Jerome is evidently speaking of the reverence due to the titles of the books-i.e. the canonical authors to whom they were traditionally

ascribed.

De Civ. Dei, lib. xv. cap. xxiii.

passage we may note in passing that it makes canonical merit dependent on the self-evidenced truth or falsehood in any given writing, and so far determinable by critical or spiritual insight rather than by extrinsic authority of any kind-a position, let us add, which has always been implicitly held by the most sane thinkers among the Fathers and Schoolmen, as well as by modern divines both Catholic and Protestant. Athanasius manifests almost a puritanic impatience of the Apocryphal writings and their nominally clandestine attributes, remarking, with satirical terseness, that they are more worthy of obscurity than recognition (ἀποκρυφῆς μᾶλλον ἢ ἀναγνώσεως ἄξια). A somewhat more complimentary interpretation of the title was suggested by our earlier Bible translators, viz. that they were wont to be read not openly, but, as it were, in secret.' Other guesses might be mentioned; but, inasmuch as their chiefest attribute seems to be their participation in the obscurity they are invoked to illumine, we pass them by. It might perhaps be thought superfluous to add another to these conjectures, but we cannot help suggesting one which we have never seen mentioned, and which has the recommendation of simplicity and directness. In our opinion Apocryphal means non-revelational, in accordance with a distinction indicated in more than one passage of the New Testament, and openly expressed by St. Paul in Colossians i. 26. It seems evident that the principle which largely dominated in establishing canonical merit, and thereby authority, was unveiling or disclosure-in technical language, revelation. The profession of esoteric doctrine, however common to the Gnostics and other alien dogmatists outside the pale of the Christian Church, was really opposed to the spirit and purport of its teaching. Nothing, therefore, could be more natural-we had almost said inevitable-than the discrimination between writings which gave information, manifested the Divine will, and others which either contained no information of the specific kind needed, or, if they claimed to contain it, presented it in a form so veiled as to be inscrutable. readers will see that this explication has the double advantage of explaining how Apocryphal came to have its first definite application to the esoteric or secret lore of the Gnostics, and why it obtained the secondary meaning, which it still retains, of spuriousness. Once granted that a given book was non-revelational, that it contained few or

* Synopsis Sacræ Script., Op. ii. p. 154.

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