of rain and snow which prevail on the banks of Winandermere ? To the consolation of a meagre and spiteful political pamphlet and the ennui of his own corroding reflexions he chose to resign himself he was his own tormentor.

Infinite and unspeakable are the consolations which this prelate, during his long retirement, might have found in the pursuits of practical religion; and great the services which he might have rendered to Christianity in general by plain and popular tracts, which from him would have required little exertion. He had a clear, familiar style, great force of thought and great power of illustration. It might have occurred to him, that though he was in effect without a bishopric, he was still a bishop; though he had abandoned his chair, he was yet professor of divinity; though he had placed himself at a distance from his cure of souls, he was yet a clergyman. He might have remembered, that all his brethren, who in former times had been expelled from their sees by civil convulsions, had in poverty and exile been exemplary for diligence in preaching, writing and study; and that he stood single and alone in the history of episcopacy, as a man who, in voluntary banishment, and in possession of all the emoluments of his profession, had degraded himself to a mere layman.* If it should be urged that the exhausted state of his mental faculties as well as his bodily health precluded such exertions, the work now before us bears ample testimony to the contrary.-Let but the subject of politics be started, and he would write and debate almost to the last with all the vigour of his best days.

But there his treasure was, and there his heart was also. The awful secret, therefore, must come out. He had, as far as we can perceive, no very powerful feeling of practical religion. He had pursued it (so far as he had studied the matter at all) like any other science. Had he drunk deeply of the genuine spirit of Christianity, how would its benign influences have gilded and dignified his declining age! Already possessed of high rank and of wealth perpetually increasing, other dispositions, such as become the sinking years of every Christian, but especially of every Christian bishop, would have taken place of that envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, with which his whole mind and spirit appear to have been corroded during the last twenty years of his life. But a translation was refused him— refused to the writer of the successful and admirable Reply to Paine. Yes, and it is well known that a bishopric was refused to Paley+

This is the more to be regretted, because the few specimens of his powers as a preacher, which he has left behind him in the Miscellaneous Volumes of his works, A.D. 1815, (for we desire to distinguish them from his political discourses,) are compositions of the very first order, and when aided by his person, voice, and manner in the pulpit, always produced a powerful impression. His discourse on the first and second Adam, and the nature of death as affected by each, is almost unequalled in originality of thought, and vigour of expression.

Not asked by himself, or with his own knowledge.

-who,

—who, without a murmur or a sigh for the disappointment, and with a constitution as deeply shattered as that of Bishop Watsou, continued to benefit his church and country to the end of his life. If ambition and rapacity, when carried to such extravagant lengths, were not things too serious to be laughed at, who could command his muscles at the absurdity of a man, who leaves his native village a poor scholar, and eats his own heart for the rest of his days because he only returns to it Bishop of Landaff! who sets out with three hundred pounds, and scarcely thinks one hundred thousand an adequate provision for his family!

But, as this fact of a non-translation is not only the great source of all the obloquy and abuse poured out on kings, queens and ministers in the present work, but the great theme and topic of declamation for his party, we shall take leave to enter somewhat at large into the merits of the case.

The patron of several benefices presents a clergyman to one of the poorest among them, on which it so happens that there is no parsonage-house, though a residence might easily be obtained. But upon this plea the incumbent almost entirely neglects the concerns of his parish, excepting when an opportunity presents itself of thwarting the patron's interest and inclinations in the vestry, which he is sure to seize with eagerness. He is also possessed of another lucrative office, which, like the first, he has converted into a sinecure, and having a private estate, resides wholly upon the last. A domestic calamity takes place in his patron's family, which this gentleman converts into an occasion of fomenting domestic animosities, and then takes it extremely ill that he has not the choice of every benefice in the family as it becomes vacant. We would ask now, whether, in the common usage of the world, a patron would not be justified in repeated præteritions? And where is the difference between such a case and Bishop Watson's claims upon the crown, coupled with the grounds of their rejection?

But here, it has been said, was an instance of peculiar and unexampled merits in the cause of religion, to which the bishop in question has rendered more eminent services than any or all of his brethren. Let it be understood that these peculiar and unexampled merits consist in the production of two pamphlets, each it is allowed useful and excellent in its way. But most things may be taken by two handles; and if our author and his disappointed advocates ground upon these short productions of a very powerful pen a claim to one of the more opulent or more exalted dignities of the church, we see the case in a very different, or rather opposite point of view. Let it be remembered, that some years before the publication of the former of these, their author had been in the enjoy

ment

ment of two thousand pounds per annum from the church, for which he had done absolutely nothing; and for which he was the first person who had done nothing. Now the question really is, not whether these productions deserved any additional recompense, but whether they were to be considered as any thing like an adequate compensation for all the neglected duties of a bishopric and a professorship. Considered in this light, we really think that no author upon earth was ever so well paid for such a service.

A few observations on our author's vaunted independence in parliament, together with the supposed demands usually made on his brethren in the exercise of their legislative office, and we have done.

There is surely some difference between independence and defiance; and so far is decent and dignified independence from being discountenanced in the episcopal order with respect to their conduct in parliament, that a busy, officious, loquacious interference on the side of ministers is never, we believe, well received. From that venerable body a becoming reserve, a comparative indifference, excepting on certain momentous questions of church polity, is rather expected than the contrary. But it is expected (we are told) of the whole body, that they vote with the court. Of some surely who have nothing to wish or to wait for, and who are, consequently, in the strictest sense, independent, this might be expected in vain were they not governed by a better principle than obsequiousness. Others again, and often those who wanted promotion most, have devoted and do devote their lives to the care of their dioceses at a distance from the business of parliament, and yet are not discountenanced by a court. Perhaps, too, a wise and discerning minister might be aware of the consequences which might follow the unwary step of rendering a man of our prelate's temper too independent. If Watson, bishop of Landaff, was factious and insolent, what might not Watson, archbishop of Canterbury, or even bishop of Durham, have become? To make him primate of Ireland would have been almost equal to the madness of casting a firebrand into a barrel of gunpowder. We have already shewn some points of resemblance betwixt Burnet and the late bishop of Landaff, betwixt one whig and another: as many, perhaps, remain to be exhibited betwixt the latter and Swift, a whig and tory. Though clergymen, the hearts and heads of both were absorbed in politics; both affected the same rude and offensive familiarity with the great; both saw, in early life, the fall of those respective administrations to which they were attached; both spent the rest of their days in libelling, or in embarrassing those which followed; and both sunk alike into moody malignity, which the poetical genius of Swift, and his talent of expressing himself with unparalleled severity in

verse, at length exasperated into madness. From this last and most deplorable calamity our prelate was happily exempt; but this is the only happiness which we can predicate of his temper and understanding in the decline of his days, and the extinction of his influence. With his domestic, or social qualities, we have no concern. It is our office to pronounce upon the evidence now before us-on his own intrepid and faithful exhibition of himself; and sorry we are to say, that in point of self-ignorance, vanity, rancour, and disappointed ambition, united with great original abilities, our country, more various in its combinations of intellect and temper than any other, has produced nothing similar or second to it since the example of Swift; and for the quiet of this church and state, or rather for the sake of human nature, we sincerely and devoutly wish that it may never be our lot to animadvert upon a third.

ERRATUM.

In the citation from Mr. Bentham's admirable orthoepical work, p. 133, for Sir Samuel of Romilly read Sir Samuel de Romilly,

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