Untitled - Electric Scotland

1856] NOMINATED BISHOP OF LONDON 193
The exact influences which led to the nomination of
Archibald Tait to the See of London are not now
ascertainable. The position he had filled for several
years in the eyes of Liberal Ministers, as one who had
not been afraid to handle the thorny question of Univer
sity Reform, and who was credited with the successful
issue of the Royal Commission on the subject ; the influ
ence of Lord Shaftesbury, who, as he afterwards wrote
to Lady Wake, had regarded Dean Tait as
much the best l!
"
by very
of the dangerous Arnoldian school ; the
esteem in which he was known to be held by the Liberals,
both of Oxford and of Cumberland ; and, last, but per
haps not least, the widespread sympathy and interest
which had been aroused, from the Throne downwards, by
all these causes
the tragic illness in the Carlisle Deanery ;
contributed to make it probable that he would be nomi
nated by
Lord Palmerston to fill one of the four vacant
Sees. Lord Shaftesbury frankly wrote, a few months
later, that his own wish had been that Mr. Pelham should
be nominated to London and Dean Tait to Norwich or
elsewhere. On this point the Prime Minister took his
own line ; but it was indeed a bold step on his part to
send Dean Tait to London. Only once during the pre
vious two hundred years had any man, not -already a
Bishop, been appointed to that diocese, and, in the case of
Dean Tait, the experiment must to many people have
seemed rash in the extreme. It would not, perhaps,
be possible to find another instance in the last half
century in which a man with so little previous training
of a technical sort has been placed at one step in a
position at once so responsible and so independent
Oxford, Rugby, Carlisle, had each of them been the scene
of hard work well done, and each had left an impress
his life and character. But his duties as tutor and
upon
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