It is not our purpose to dwell at any length upon the labours of Edward Stanley as a bishop of the Church of England; suffice it to say that on leaving Alderley, where so many years of his useful life had been spent, and which was endeared to him by so many ties of affection and sympathy, he turned with alacrity to the work which lay before him, and with the same spirit of energy, and the same dauntless courage, applied himself to the development of those schemes of practical usefulness that lay within his grasp, in order that his cathedral city might become the centre of the moral and religious life of the diocese. Broad in his sympathies, courageous in his outspeaking, and impetuous in his temperament, he oftentimes brought himself in conflict with those who were content with things as they had been, and in the earlier years of his episcopate he found his diocese anything but a bed of roses, for during the closing years of the long rule of his predecessor, Bishop Bathurst, Norwich had been a byword for laxity among the sees of the English Church, a condition of things the new prelate could not endure. Stanley's whole life had been a protest against the lethargy and inactivity which was then only too common a characteristic of the clergy, yet his broad liberality, his fatherly sympathy, and his geniality and simplicity enabled him, while correcting abuses, always to leave peace behind. His personal kindness won the hearts of the clergy of his diocese as thoroughly as it had previously won those of the cottagers in his parish. "I felt," said one of them, after a visit from the bishop, "as if a sunbeam had passed through my parish, and had left me to rejoice in its genial and cheerful warmth. From that day I would have died to serve him; and I believe that not a few of my humble flock were animated in a greater or less degree by the same kind of feeling." [Illustration: Handwritten signature]