by impudence, and overlooked by sloth. By the proceedings and publications of the last six months all disguise is done away. The rancour, the industry, the unanimity of the libellers are not less evident than formidable. The absolute necessity of encountering them is perceived and admitted, and they must be encountered by that opposition of which they are notoriously most afraid. One branch of such opposition is to serve all who resemble Mr. John Ambrose Williams, as Mr. John Ambrose Williams has been served: to let the law take its course, and regard not the clamour which its terrors and penalties may excite. What better proof can we require of the efficacy of any hostile proceeding, than the displeasure of those against whom it is directed? The outcry against prosecutions for libel is one proof of their propriety. Sharpers and felons concur with Mr. Brougham and Mr. Williams in denouncing "the intolerable oppression of the law." What the tread-mill is to the pick-pocket, the King's Bench is to the libeller, his dread and his desert. The louder he cries the more he is hurt. In such a cause the spirit of martyrdom will have few imitators, and a brief existence; it will beget no sympathy, and excite no applause. A little ranting declamation will be the chief part of its bad effects; the good ones will be the restoration of confidence and peace.

But we have no desire to draw the legal halter too tight round the neck of the politician. Whether he writes for faction or for food, some allowance should be made for warmth of temper, and for habitual exaggeration. We neither want a Censor to purify the press at its source, nor a StarChamber to bank up its channel. We would prosecute nothing but what is unequivocally libellous and abusive. While public writers keep on the windy side of the law, while in humble imitation of the Edinburgh Reviewer, they consider the risque which their publisher must run by giving unlimited liberty to their pens, such cautious men may be encountered with other weapons than those which we employ against a fearless slanderer. False statements and false reasonings should be met as Dr. Phillpotts meets them and the defence which he establishes, and the castigation which he inflicts, will excite as much wrath as the prospect of a prosecution for libel. He will be assailed with all the virulence of his critical traducers. Their discomfiture will be confessed by an eager and inveterate hostility, and his triumph proclaimed and secured by dignified retreat from the contest.

:

The first twelve pages of Dr. Phillpotts's Letter contain remarks upon that part of the article in question, which does

not immediately refer to the Durham Clergy; and in this short space the Reviewer is convicted of gross ignorance upon the subjects of the real presence and the power of remitting sins, and of wilful falsehood in his statements respecting Bishop Butler, and the Bishop of London. The following passage will shew how completely this task is effected.

"The Reviewer is anxious to have it believed, that our present Bishops, among many other points of inferiority to their predecessors, are distinguished by an increased and increasing spirit of luxury, avarice, and selfishness. It suited this purpose to set forth with high encomiums the splendid liberality of Bishop Butler, in disposing of the revenues of his great preferments: but it did not suit the same purpose, to state the real object, on which his largest munificence was bestowed, namely, an Episcopal Palace. This, I say, it was not convenient to the Reviewer to mention: for, blunderer as he is, he could not be blind to the manifest absurdity of denouncing all living Bishops, in the gross, for living sumptuously in vast and splendid Palaces,' and holding forth one, who is deceased, as a pattern of truly primitive virtue, for rearing a Palace for himself and his successors to live in.

"Accordingly, by a stroke of his pen he changes the Palace at Bristol into the Cathedral, on the repairs of which he tells us, that the Bishop 'expended more than he received from the See.' Those who will take the trouble of looking into the Biography of this eminent man, (a trouble which I can venture to promise them will be its own reward) will find, that he did indeed expend in repairing and improving the Episcopal Palace at Bristol four thousand pounds, which is said to have been more than the whole revenues of the Bishopric amounted to, during his continuance in that See*?

"I know not whether it is worth while to add, that so little averse to the decoration of his Palaces was this great ornament of the English Church, that in less than two years, during which he presided over the Diocese of Durham he found time and means to expend largely on the Castle, the Episcopal residence, in that city, where his armorial bearings in all the perfect folly of Heraldry,' as his Encomiast calls it when speaking of modern Prelates, still mark the scene of his munificence. In the same richly endowed See, whose high secular privileges demand some due proportion of secular state, he disdained not to live with all the splendour of the most splendid of those who had preceded him, attended by a body of serving men gorgeously apparelled' (as the Reviewer chooses to describe footmen in purple liveries of these days); copying in such matters after his ancient Patron, Bishop Talbot, and studiously departing from the more sparing pattern set by his immediate

*"See Life prefixed to Halifax's Edition of his Works: see also Chalmer's Biog. Dict. and Hutchinson's History of Durham."

predecessor. All this he did, without ceasing to 'regard himself as Steward for the Poor,' where their real interests required his aid, and without departing from that simplicity which becomes the Christian Bishop,-knowing' well not only how to be abased,' but also how to abound.'

6

"From this pitiful forgery respecting Bishop Butler, a name too pure, as well as too exalted, to be sullied even by the false and treacherous praises of such a writer as this, I pass to a more culpable act of the same description, committed against a living. Prelate,-against one, whose mild virtues, and truly Christian meekness of demeanour, (I will not on such an occasion do him the injustice of referring to his higher qualities,) might have been expected to disarm the hostility of the most inveterate enemy of his order. But the rancour of a thorough-paced Reformer finds in these virtues only fresh and stronger motives to his hatred. Accordingly our Reviewer fastens on this Prelate with a pertinacity of misrepresentation, which can only be accounted for by his reliance on the unwillingness of such a man to stoop to the exposure of his artifices.

The Bishop, in a charge to his Clergy, thus speaks of the Unitarian System, a system of which both himself, and those whom he was addressing, had in the most solemn manner, and on the most awful occasions, declared their conscientious disbelief. Its influence,' says he, has generally been confined to men of some education, whose thoughts have been little employed on the subject of religion; or who, loving rather to question than learn, have approached the oracles of divine truth without that humble docility, that prostration of the understanding and will, which are indispensable to proficiency in Christian Instruction.' With what feelings this Reviewer is accustomed to approach those divine Oracles, I do not permit myself to conjecture: I earnestly hope, that they are very different from those which accompany his worldly studies. But the following is the manner, in which he represents the words of the Bishop. It is the duty of the people to reverence the Church and its members in silent acquiescence,' with that prostration of the understanding and will, which a Right Reverend Prelate has openly prescribed, as the best frame of mind upon all ecclesiastical subjects.'

"Can the dishonesty of this writer go further? Yes :-and in the instance of this very same Bishop, whose language on another occasion is still more wickedly mis-stated. More wickedly I say, because the object of this latter fraud is not only to misrepresent the words of the Bishop, for the purpose of serving a present turn, -but also to hold forth his person to public indignation, as a courtly Sycophant,' one guilty of an excess of adulation unknown in the most despotic reigns,'-one, whose baseness could only be paralleled by those fawning preachers' in Charles the First's time, who in part caused the troubles that ensued, by their extravagant doctrines respecting the right of Kings, giving unto Cæsar what Cæsar refused to take, as not belonging to him.'

"It appears, that in the course of the proceedings in the House of Lords on the Bill for degrading the late Queen, the Bishop of London maintained (what every man who loves the Constitution will maintain with him) that an enquiry into the personal conduct of the King would be unconstitutional; for said he, citing the words of Blackstone, the King is not under the coercive power of the law, which will not suppose him capable of committing a folly, much less a crime.' For speaking thus, this distinguished Prelate is charged by our Reviewer with proclaiming, in his place in the House of Lords, that by the Constitution of this Country, the King is exempt from all moral blame; thus perverting the marim which protects the Sovereign from personal responsibility, into the monstrous doctrine, that nothing which he does, as an individual, can actually be wrong."

"That in a moment of popular delirium, such a misrepresentation of the Bishop's words should have been made by those whose interest it was, at all hazards, to keep alive the delusion, could excite no surprise. But it ought be a matter of astonishment, that so flagrant a perversion of the truth,-now when the frenzy, which alone gave it a chance of being credited even by the vulgar, has long passed away,-should be hazarded in any journal, maintaining the slightest pretension, I will not say to honesty, but even to prudence. The whole passage of the Commentator on the Laws of England, part of which was cited by the Bishop, will be found below P. 7.

Dr. Phillpotts then adverts to those parts of the Review which more immediately concern himself and the Clergy of Durham. We extract his account of the opening charge.

"He begins with the following statement: A newspaper of merely local circulation, had published a few remarks upon the factious spirit of some of the Durham Clergy, in ordering the bells not to toll at her Majesty's decease, a mark of respect invariably shewn to all the Members of the Royal Family.'

"Of the three propositions expressed, or implied, in this statement, the first is a wilful concealment of the truth. An honest man, in stating the case, as this Reviewer professes to do, would at least have said, that the remarks of the Newspaper (whether he considered them excusable, or not) were of a very coarse and in

"To these several cases, in which the incapacity of committing crimes arises from a deficiency of the will, we may add one more, in which the law supposes an incapacity of doing wrong, from the excellence and perfection of the person; which extend as well to the will as to the other qualities of his mind. I mean the case of the king: who, by virtue of his royal prerogative, is not under the coercive power of the law; which will not suppose him capable of committing a folly, much less a crime. We are therefore, out of reverence and decency, to forbear any idle inquiries, of what would be the consequence if the king were to act thus and thus; since the law deems so highly of his wisdom and virtue, as not even to presume it possible for him to do any thing inconsistent with his station and dignity; and therefore has made no provision to remedy such a grievance.→ Blackstone's Comm. Book iv, c. 2, ad fin.

temperate kind. But, of this I shall have occasion to say more hereafter. The other two propositions are direct falsehoods. It is false, that the Clergy of Durham ordered that the bells should not toll at her Majesty's decease; it is also false, that the tolling of the bells is a mark of respect invariably shewn to all the Members of the Royal Family."

This pithy declaration is confirmed in the subsequent pages, and the Doctor clearly establishes three points. First, that the Clergy have been the defendants not the assailants in this contest. Secondly, that they took no part in the question respecting the late Queen, beyoud an expression of their dissent from the County Resolutions. Thirdly, that the prosecutor in the criminal information was the venerable Bishop of the diocese,"feeling as he always feels, as the friend and father of his Clergy," and acting" under the advice (not merely the cold legal opinion) of his AttorneyGeneral, Mr. Scarlett." The following extract though somewhat long, is too valuable to be passed over, and the reader will observe that it acquaints us with two important facts:one relating to Mr. Scarlett's absurd oratorical flourish in praise of the silent grief which was manifested at the death of the Queen; the other, to Mr. Brougham's confession, that the real object of the defence was to excite in the public mind, feelings hostile to the Clergy.

"To manifest at once the sort of spirit with which this Northern Rhadamanthus is embued, I will exhibit the Defendant's libel, and the description of it as given in the Review, desiring our readers, at the same time, to recollect, that the utmost care has been taken by the Reviewer to keep every part of the libel itself from appearing in his pages.

LIBEL.

"So far as we have been able to judge from the accounts in the public papers, a mark of respect to her late Majesty has been almost universally paid throughout the kingdom, when the painful tidings of her decease was received, by tolling the bells of the cathedrals and churches. But there is one exception to this very creditable fact, which demands especial notice. In this episcopal city, containing six churches, independently of the Cathedral, not a single bell announced the departure of the magnanimous spirit of the most injured of Queens-the most persecuted of women. Thus the brutal enmity of those who embittered her mortal existence, pursues her in her shroud. We know not whether actual orders were issued to prevent this customary sign of mourning; but the omission plainly indicates the kind of spirit which predominates among our Clergy. Yet these men profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, to walk in his footsteps, to teach his precepts, to in culcate his spirit, to promote harmony, charity, and christian love!