dining at an early hour with his pupil (and occasionally, it is believed, on cold meat), to be a spiritual lord; he is dressed in a magnificent dress, decorated with a title, flattered by chaplains, and surrounded by little people looking up for the things which he has to give away; and this often happens to a man who has had no opportunities of seeing the world, whose parents were in very humble life, and who has given up all his thoughts to the Frogs of Aristophanes and the Targum of Onkelos. How is it possible that such a man should not lose his head? that he should not swell? that he should not be guilty of a thousand follies, and worry and tease to death (before he recovers his common sense) a hundred men as good, and as wise, and as able as himself.

THE DUTCH CHRONICLE OF DORT.

I MET, the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage so apposite to this subject, that though it is somewhat too light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of the translation: “And there was great store of bishops in the town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of the state were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse, the Merve, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of Beverlandt, and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my lords the bishops, Simon of Gloucester, who was a bishop in those parts, disputed with Vorstius, and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many propositions made, and it waxed toward twelve of the clock, my lords the bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in which was great store of good things, - and among the rest a roasted peacock, having, in lieu of a tail, the arms and banners of the archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured the church-and then the archbishop would say a grace, as was seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished, a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were gathered under the window, cried out, Bread! bread! for there was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three

POPULAR CHURCH PROMOTION.

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times the ordinary price of the sleich; and when they had done crying Bread! bread! they called out No bishops!--and began to cast up stones at the windows. Whereat my lords the bishops were in a great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did devour the meats with great appetite; and then you might have seen my lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, 'Good, my lords, is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who count lower in the church than you do, should feast and fluster? Let us order to us the dinner of the deans and canons, which is making ready for them in the chamber below.' And this speech of Simon of Gloucester pleased the bishops much; so that they sent for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the public good, and he, much fearing the bishops, brought them the dinner of the deans and canons; and so the deans and canons went away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town, because they had not put any meat out of the window like the bishops; and when the count came to hear of it, he said it was a pleasant conceit, and that the bishops were right cunning men, and had ding'd the canons well."

YOUNG CRUMPET'S ASCENT TO ST. PAUL'S.

I AM surprised it does not strike the mountaineers how very much the great emoluments of the church are flung open to the lowest ranks of the community. Butchers, bakers, publicans, schoolmasters, are perpetually seeing their children elevated to the mitre. Let a respectable baker drive through the city from the west end of the town, and let him cast an eye on the battlements of Northumberland House, has his little muffin-faced son the smallest chance of getting in among the Percies, enjoying a share of their luxury and splendour, and of chasing the deer with hound and horn upon the Cheviot Hills? But let him drive his alumsteeped loaves a little farther, till he reaches St. Paul's Church

*A measure in the bailiwick of Dort, containing two gallons one pint English dry measure.-Author's Note. The whole passage from the Chron. icle, of course, a pleasant invention.

yard, and all his thoughts are changed when he sees that beautiful fabric; it is not impossible that his little penny roll may be introduced into that splendid oven. Young Crumpet is sent to school-takes to his books-spends the best years of his life, as all eminent Englishmen do, in making Latin verses-knows that the crum in crumpet is long, and the pet short-goes to the University-gets a prize for an Essay on the Dispersion of the Jews -takes orders- becomes a bishop's chaplain has a young nobleman for his pupil—publishes a useless classic, and a serious call to the unconverted-and then goes through the Elysian transitions of prebendary, dean, prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and power.

LORD MELBOURNE.

VISCOUNT MELBOURNE declared himself quite satisfied with the church as it is; but if the public had any desire to alter it, they might do as they pleased. He might have said the same thing of the monarchy, or of any other of our institutions; and there is in the declaration a permissiveness and good humour which, in public men, have seldom been exceeded. Carelessness, however, is but a poor imitation of genius, and the formation of a wise and well-reflected plan of reform conduces more to the lasting fame of a minister than that affected contempt of duty which every man sees to be mere vanity, and a vanity of no very high description. But if the truth must be told, our Viscount is somewhat of an impostor. Everything about him seems to betoken careless desolation; any one would suppose from his manner that he was playing at chuck-farthing with human happiness; that he was always on the heel of pastime; that he would giggle away the great charter, and decide by the method of tee-totum whether my lords the bishops should or should not retain their seats in the House of Lords. All this is the mere vanity of surprising, and making us believe that he can play with kingdoms as other men can with nine-pins. Instead of this lofty nebulo, this miracle of moral and intellectual felicities, he is nothing more than a sensible, honest man, who means to do his duty to the sovereign and to the country; instead of being the ignorant man he pretends to be, before he meets the deputation of tallow-chandlers in the morning, he sits up half the

335 night talking with Thomas Young about melting and skimming, and then, though he has acquired knowledge enough to work off a whole vat of prime Leicester tallow, he pretends next morning not to know the difference between a dip and a mould. In the same way, when he has been employed in reading acts of Parliament, he would persuade you that he has been reading Cleghorn on the Beatitudes, or Pickler on the Nine Difficult Points. Neither can I allow to this minister (however he may be irritated by the denial) the extreme merit of indifference to the consequences of his measures. I believe him to be conscientiously alive to the good or evil that he is doing, and that his caution has more than once arrested the gigantic projects of the Lycurgus of the Lower House. I am sorry to hurt any man's feelings, and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gayety he has reared; but I accuse our minister of honesty and diligence; I deny that he is careless or rash: he is nothing more than a man of good understanding, and good principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political roué.

THE BISHOPS AND SMALL LIVINGS.

RUSSELL AND THE BISHOPS-AN APOLOGUE.

THIS is very good episcopal reasoning; but is it true? The bishops and commissioners wanted a fund to endow small livings; they did not touch a farthing of their own incomes, only distributed them a little more equally; and proceeded lustily at once to confiscate cathedral property. But why was it necessary, if the fund for small livings was such a paramount consideration, that the future archbishops of Canterbury should be left with two palaces, and £15,000 per annum? Why is every future bishop of London to have a palace in Fulham, a house in St. James's Square, and £10,000 a-year? Could not all the episcopal functions be carried on well and effectually with the half of these incomes? Is it necessary that the Archbishop of Canterbury should give feasts to aristocratic London; and that the domestics of the prelacy should stand with swords and bag-wigs round pig, and turkey, and venison, to defend, as it were, the orthodox gastronome from the fierce Unitarian, the fell Baptist, and all the famished children of dissent? I don't object to all this; because I am sure that the method of prizes and blanks is the best method of supporting a church, which

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HORNED CATTLE AND THE LION.

must be considered as very slenderly endowed, if the whole were equally divided among the parishes; but if my opinion were different if I thought the important improvement was to equalize preferment in the English church- -that such a measure was not the one thing foolish, but the one thing needful-I should take care, as a mitred commissioner, to reduce my own species of preferment to the narrowest limits, before I proceeded to confiscate the property of any other grade of the church. I could not, as a conscientious man, leave the Archbishop of Canterbury with £15,000 a-year, and make a fund by annihilating residentiaries at Bristol of £500. This comes of calling a meeting of one species of cattle only. The horned cattle say―"If you want any meat, kill the sheep; don't meddle with us, there is no beef to spare." They said this, however, to the lion; and the cunning animal, after he had gained all the information necessary for the destruction of the muttons, and learned how well and widely they pastured, and how they could be most conveniently eaten up, turns round and informs the cattle, who took him for their best and tenderest friend, that he means to eat them up also. Frequently did Lord John meet the destroying bishops; much did he commend their daily heap of ruins; sweetly did they smile on each other, and much charming talk was there of meteorology and catarrh, and the particular cathedral they were pulling down at each period ;* till one fine day, the Home Secretary, with a voice more bland, and a look more ardently affectionate, than that which the masculine mouse bestows on his nibbling female, informed them that the government meant to take all the church property into their own hands, to pay the rates out of it, and deliver the residue to the rightful possessors. Such an effect, they say, was never before produced by a coup de théâtre. The commission was separated in an instant: London clinched his fist; Canterbury was hurried out by his chaplains, and put into a warm bed; a solemn vacancy spread itself over the face of Gloucester; Lincoln was taken out in strong hysterics. What a noble scene Serjeant Talfourd would have made of this! Why are such talents wasted on Ion and the Athenian Captive?

*"What cathedral are we pulling down to-day?" was the standing ques tion at the Commission.