Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

religious or political society, are compatible with perfect sincerity of heart, and how far it is required of persons placed in situations of trust and power to contract their regards and their exertions to the views of that particular association by which they have been entrusted. With respect to the first; if, in matters of trifling moment, no private wish, no individual opinion is to be sacrificed to the interests of the society to which we belong, no society can exist; if every thing is to be given up for that purpose, the rights of conscience are at an end, and unprincipled selfishness will swallow up every dignified and every independent feeling of the heart. With respect to the second; it is obvious that in no instance whatever are we permitted to oppress, or in any way do wrong to societies to which we do not belong, in order to serve the individual interests of that to which we do belong. But this is all.-To withhold positive assistance; to discountenance accessions of power or numbers to rival associations, and not to hold ourselves indifferent, provided that the general interests of religion or of literature be promoted, by whom they are promoted-these are imperious and pressing duties owing by every one who has accepted an office of power and trust towards the society to whom he is indebted for the office. It is the implied, and, in many instances, the express condition on which it is offered. Such, however, was not the conduct of Bishop Watson. He was elevated, paid, entrusted by the Church of England; yet, overlooking her special claims on his services, he deemed himself acquitted of all unfaithfulness to her interests, when, with avowed indifference to her as to a particular and national establishment, he expressed a regard to the universal church of Christ, and acted accordingly. In conformity with this principle, though he has no where told his readers of the fact, while resident in the University of Cambridge, he promoted a subscription for rebuilding the University of Edinburgh, alleging, in his large and liberal spirit, that if the interests of learning were promoted at all, it was of no importance to mankind whether they were promoted on this or that side of the Tweed. This was true as a general proposition; but he might have remembered that it was of importance to his own university, to which he was antecedently bound by every tie of fidelity and gratitude. However pernicious and however detestable bigotry may be, (and we are ready to stigmatize it as severely as our author,) such universal laxity and indifference (its opposites) are scarcely less prejudicial to the interests of mankind. There is much warm and generous feeling, after all, in local, in professional, in national, in academical prepossessions; all of which is annihilated by these wild and generalizing principles-the flame cools in proportion as it is diffused.

Henceforward we must cease to contemplate the life and cha

racter

racter of Dr. Watson with any mixture of satisfaction. We can look back with pleasure on the toils and attainments of his early academical life; the vigour and activity with which he discharged its most laborious offices; and even the high and independent spirit which he manifested on every occasion. Hitherto we can pardon the natural effects of success, almost unexampled, upon a spirit too elate and haughty; but we would, if our duty permitted, turn with disgust indeed, yet in disappointed silence, from the conduct and the temper of his latter days, stimulated as he was by one step of ecclesiastical rank to an unappeasable ambition of more; courting translations," now by mean application, and now by rude defiance; and lastly, pouring out the vials of his wrath, without measure and without mercy, on the real or supposed authors of his disappointment. To verify these facts must be our reluctant and painful task in the remainder of the present Article. Were we to transcribe every passage in which, in terms or by implication, the writer vaunts of his own candour and liberality of sentiment, when, in fact, he is merely defying something venerable in the church or respectable in the state, our labours would have no end but with the volume before us. We shall content ourselves, therefore, with extracting certain præconia, which few men, but the bishop of Landaff, would not have blushed to produce on their own behalf.

'This doctrine' (it matters not what) Mr. Fox had been taught, not only by Sydney and Locke, but by Sir George Savile and the late Earl of Chatham; and if these authorities would not suffice, he would refer the House to a sermon preached by Dr. Watson, the present bishop of Landaff-replete with manly sense and accurate reasoning?

Again: Ortus a quercu non a salice, I knew not how to bend my principles to the circumstances of the times. I could not adopt the versatility of sentiment which Lord Bacon, with more of worldly wisdom than of honour, recommends as necessary to a man occupied in the fabrication of his own fortune. Ingenia," he says, gravia ac solennia, et mutare nescia, plus plerumque habent dignitatis quàm felicitatis."

[ocr errors]

66

Of course, the disposition of Dr. Watson was, in his own conception, one of the gravia ac solennia et mutare nescia.Once

more

My temper could never brook submission to the ordinary means of ingratiating myself with great men. I was determined to be advanced in my profession by force of desert, or not at all.'

On another occasion:- Amongst other complimentary letters, I received one from Dr. Keene, bishop of Ely, in which he expressed his wishes that I had formed my character solely upon the learning and ability (he was pleased to say) I possessed, and not on politics.'

[blocks in formation]

'His

'His lordship thanked me, and said, "He should be happy to have an opportunity of serving the public by serving me."'

Of the bishop's speech on the Regency Bill, he was told, that it was looked upon, by at least one side of the house, as the best which had been produced in either House of Parliament.' It was, indeed, clear, forcible, and argumentative. After this he was told by the regent, on being seized by a sudden resolution to retire from all public concerns, No; you shall never retire: a man of your talents shall never be lost to the public.' When I sat down,' (after his speech on the union with Ireland,) the bishop of Rochester (Horsley) complimented me with saying, that he had never heard such a speech in the House of Lords, and should never hear such another; to which the infatuated egotist subjoins, with great glee, a letter from Dr. Joseph Warton, in which he styles this same speech most eloquent, nervous, convincing, and unanswerable.Ohe jam satis est!

On the cold reception of his collection of Theological Tracts among his brethren, he says, 'I was not at all mortified at this conduct of the two archbishops, for I had but a poor opinion of the theological knowledge of either of their graces.'

I considered the acquisition of it (a bishopric) as no proof of personal merit, inasmuch as bishoprics are as often given to the flattering dependents, or to the unlearned younger branches of noble families, as to men of the greatest erudition; and I considered the possession of it as one great cause of personal demerit, for I saw the generality of the bishops bartering their independence, and the dignity of their order, for the chance of a translation, and polluting gospel humility by the pride of prelacy.'

[ocr errors]

This refers to his crude and impracticable plan, which, after all, was not originally his own, but Burnet's, for equalizing the bishoprics of England. This being accomplished,' (mark, gentle reader! mark what follows, and from whom,) oblige him to a longer residence in his diocese than is usually practised, that he may do the proper work of a bishop; that he may direct and inspect the flock of Christ; that by his exhortations he may confirm the unstable; by his admonitions reclaim the reprobate; and by the purity of his life render religion amiable and interesting unto all.'

Dr. Watson, when this portentous instance of human inconsistency, or rather audacity, escaped him, was a richer man than his equalizing plan would have rendered the bishop of Landaff. He is now, to use an elegant and favourite word of his own, rotting in his grave, otherwise we should have presumed to ask, In more than twenty years, how many days has your lordship' resided in your diocese'?-At the distance of two hundred miles, how have you'directed and inspected the flock of Christ'-By what 'exhor

tations

tations have you confirmed the unstable-by what admonitions reclaimed the reprobate'?-Have you the comfort of knowing that any single soul has been the better for all your ministrations in the diocese committed to you?

Surely the sect is not extinct who were wont to lay on men's shoulders burthens too heavy to be borne, while they themselves would not touch them with a finger!

But to return. His reason for abandoning all study for the future is thus expressed :

'Had my health been better, I should have had little reason for persevering in my studies as I had done. I could not bring myself to vote as a minister bade me on all occasions, and I perceived that, such was the temper of the times, or such the temper of the man, nothing less than that could secure his attention.'

Next follows an account of a personal insult offered to his sovereign at the levee :

'The king gave me a blow about a republic; I answered that I could not live under a republic. His majesty still pursued the subject. I thought myself insulted, and firmly said, "Sir, I look upon the tyranny of any one man to be an intolerable evil, and on the tyranny of a hundred to be a hundred times as bad."'!

[ocr errors]

Yet notwithstanding this did the modest rejoiner continue to expect a translation !—

[ocr errors]

After the debate on the regency, the queen imprudently distinguished by different degrees of courtesy, on the one hand, and meditated affronts on the other, those who had voted with and against the minister. She received me with a degree of coldness which would have appeared to herself ridiculous, could she have imagined how a mind such as mine' (looking down on kings and queens as from an higher sphere) regarded, in its honourable proceedings, the displeasure of a woman, though that woman happened to be a queen.'

'I advised him' (the Prince of Wales) to bear with his mother's ill-humour.'

This is very much in the coarse style of Burnet. Next appears the Lord Chancellor:

'I neither thought so highly of the chancellor's talents, nor so meanly of my own, on the subject of an ecclesiastical reform, as to judge that it became me to overlook his discourtesy in not answering my letter.'

Perhaps the most exceptionable passage in the whole volume is the following:

The ministers refused to cover themselves with the infamy which would justly have attended their submission to such a demand. They refused and were dismissed. Such ministers at Constantinople would have lost their heads: at London, they as yet' (in italics) only lost their places. Whilst there remained a competitor of the Stuart family to the throne of Great Britain, the kings of the House of Brunswick

Q 2

[ocr errors]

were

were perhaps afraid of that competition, and were satisfied with having been elevated from an arbitrary dominion over a petty principality in Germany to the possession of a limited monarchy over the most enlightened and most commercial nation in the world. That competition being now extinguished, it could not be thought unnatural were they to indulge a desire of emancipating themselves from the restraints of parliament; but there is no way of effecting this so secref, safe, and obvious, as by corrupting it.'

[ocr errors]

Twice in the present volume has this bold politician asserted the advantage of a surviving competitor to the throne of these realms in a rival of the House of Stuart; but the expression of the House of Brunswick having been elevated from an arbitrary dominion over a petty principality to govern England, is not only conceived in the spirit but almost couched in the words of Paine, of whom it may be remembered, that he talked of sending for a man out of Germany to govern us.' This, however, is nothing to what follows---in which the present representatives of that august house, which, for more than a century, has governed this country more mildly and equitably than any nation upon earth ever was governed, are personally accused of wishing to emancipate themselves from all restraints of parliament, and of desiring to take the safest and most secret, that is, the wickedest and most insidious way to that end-by corruption. It has been whispered that the prudence of the publisher subjected the present work to some severe castrations; how this offensive and impudent paragraph came to escape the knife we do not pretend to guess. There have been times in which the printer would not have escaped another operation: late examples may perchance have taught such despisers of truth and shame, what may now be done with impunity; yet these are days of persecution.

The subject of disappointed ambition, as it had poisoned his mind with rancour and tinctured all his conversation, is widely diffused over the volume before us. It is astonishing that a man of Dr. Watson's understanding should not have known, that the greatest triumph which can be given to an enemy, is to shew that he has galled the object of his enmity. How dignified, how honourable, might his retirement have been, had he had the fortitude to look down with indifference on rewards which he no longer wanted! If he were not mortified to the world as a Christian, he might have contemned it as a philosopher; but he clung to it with a grasp no less eager on the verge of fourscore, than at the period and in the vigour of legitimate ambition. A single instance of this spirit, in which he submitted himself to the miserable degradation of being pitied by a stranger, we shall give in his own words:

'I was, while at Merthyr, most hospitably entertained by Mr. Crawshay (an iron-master.) This gentleman, in common with many

others

« AnteriorContinuar »