Hicks, Haecs, Hocs: Diaries of a Good Bishop

Extract

In the preface to his edition of Manilius, Housman lamented that ‘Our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley’s Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester.’

Unlike Blomfield, and his own immediate predecessor at Lincoln, Edward-King, Hicks is not favoured with any mention in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Nor was he a giant among classical scholars. But thanks to the recent publication of a selection from his diaries*, we can see him as we can see few others of his kind; these glimpses afford welcome (especially in the light of recent turmoils at Lincoln Cathedral) evidence of a good man of versatile virtues, proof that moving from academe to a see need not be a stroke of doom for classical scholars, and refutation of the old adage that nothing improves by translation except a bishop.

There was no controversy over the Dean who welcomed Edward Lee Hicks to his see in June 1910. Though unremarked in Neville’s edition, he was none other than Hicks’ old Oxford tutor and examiner, E. C. Wickham, fellow-classicist and editor of Horace, whose death Hicks will presently lament, as was his wont, in choice Latin, mindful of Samuel Johnson’s instructions that ‘Epitaphs should be in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent should be.’ But ecclesiastical as well as secular immoralities were a constant thorn in Hicks’ side, thanks in large measure to the astonishing country parsons he encountered in his far-flung jurisdiction, a gallery of characters worthy of the Trollopes (Anthony and Joanna) and Barbara Pym.