She went to hear him on some other great occasion, and she said:--"I saw him go into the pulpit; I heard him address {259} the people, and I was waiting all the time thinking when will he have done talking and begin to preach, until, to my surprise, I found what purported to be a sermon coming to a conclusion, yet I can remember to this day almost everything he said." From the little weight Father Spencer laid upon human learning in the work of conversion, one would be tempted to suppose he undervalued what he did not possess. No greater mistake could be made. He was a Cambridge first-class man, and must therefore be a good mathematical and classical scholar. He spoke Italian and French almost without a grammatical fault, and conversed very well in German. He was well read in the English Protestant divines, and knew Catholic theology with accuracy, and to an extent which his academical course would not lead us to expect. It may be said that his youth and manhood were spent over the pages of the best English writers, and in the company often of the best living authors. Althorp and Spencer House were famous for their literary coteries, and the son of an earl who patronized men of talent, and gave unmistakable proofs of great talent himself, was not one to let such opportunities pass without profit. He trusted little, however, to the sway of intellect, and put his hope in fervent petitions for divine grace. He told Dr. Wiseman that he should apply his mind to something more practical than Syriac manuscripts, or treatises on geology, and that he would rather see him taken up with what suited a priest on the English mission as it then was. The rector, of course, took the rebuke as humility dictated; but we should certainly be sorry that he had not written his _Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion_, and his _Lectures on the Eucharist_. Spencer, to be sure, was mistaken in this; but the idea gave a bent to his mind, which he could hardly be expected to change when hampered with the work of a parish. They who knew him well can give testimony to his high attainments, and all who ever heard him speak of himself can bear a more ample testimony still to the very low opinion he had of his own acquirements. It is no wonder that he {260} wrote no books; the little he did publish in the way of newspaper letters and sermons during his last years in West Bromwich, did not produce much apparent effect. It is not our province to review these here, but it is well to say that the sermons rank far above his spoken ones in point of style and matter, especially the French sermon he preached in Dieppe in 1838. The prayers, to which he chiefly trusted for the conversion of his countrymen, did not bring much evident gain. Others reaped what he sowed in this way, and he tells us in the Dieppe sermon that during a confirmation Dr. Walsh gave in that year he had 600 new converts to impose hands upon.