incur it in the poor-law bill, in the tithe bill, in the corporation bill, and in the circumscription of the Irish Protestant Church. In all these matters, the whig mi. nistry, after the heat of party is over, and when Joseph Hume and Wilson Croker are powdered into the dust of death, will gain great and deserved fame. In the question of the church commission they have behaved with the grossest injustice; delighted to see this temporary delirium of archbishops and bishops, scarcely believing their eyes, and carefully suppressing their laughter, when they saw these eminent conservatives laying about them with the fury of Mr. Tyler or Mr. Straw; they have taken the greatest care not to disturb them, and to give them no offence: Do as you like, my lords, with the chapters and the parochial clergy; you will find some pleasing morsels in the ruins of the cathedrals. Keep for yourselves any thing you like-whatever is agreeable to you cannot be unpleasant to us.' In the mean time, the old friends of, and the old sufferers for, liberty, do not understand this new meanness, and are not a little astonished to find their leaders prostrate on their knees before the lords of the church, and to receive no other answer from them than that, if they are disturbed in their adulation, they will immediately resign!

I remain,

My dear Sir,

With sincere good will and respect,

Yours,
SYDNEY SMITH.

Not only do these prebendaries do nothing, and are never seen, but the existence of the preferment, is hardly known; and the abolition of the preferment, therefore, would not in any degree lessen the tempta tion to enter into the church, while the mass of these preferments would make an important fund for the improvement of small livings. The residentiary prebendiaries, on the contrary, perform all the services of the cathedral church; their existence is known, their preferment coveted, and to get a stall, and to be preceded by men with silver rods, is the bait which the ambitious squire is perpetually holding out to his second son. What prebendary is next to come into residence, is as important a topic to the cathedral town, and ten miles around it, as what the evening or moruing star may be to the astronomer. I will venture to say, that there is not a man of good humour, sense, and worth, within ten miles of Worcester, who does not hail the rising of Archdeacon Singleton in the horizon as one of the most agreeable events of the year. If such sort of preferments are extinguished, a very serious evil (as I have often said before) is done to the church-the service becomes unpopular, further spoliation is dreaded, the whole system is considered to be altered and degraded, capital is withdrawn from the church, and no one enters into the profession but the sons of farmers and little tradesmen, who would be footmen if they were not vicars-or figure on the coach-box if they were not lecturing from the pulpit.

But what a practical rebuke to the commissioners, after all their plans and consultations and carvings of cathedral preferment, to leave it integral, and un

SECOND LETTER TO ARCHDEACON SINGLE- touched! It is some comfort, however, to me, to

MY DEAR SIR,

TON.

Ir is a long time since you heard from me, and in the mean time the poor Church of England has been trembling, from the bishop who sitteth on the throne, to the curate who rideth upon the hackney horse, began writing on the subject to avoid bursting from indignation; and, as it is not my habit to recede, I will go on till the Church of England is either up or down-semianimous on its back, or vigorous on its

legs.

think that the persons of all others to whom this preservation of cathedral property would give the greatest pleasure, are the ecclesiastical commissioners themselves. Can any one believe that the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London really wishes for the coufiscation of any cathedral property, or that they were driven to it by any thing but fear, iningled, perhaps, with a little vanity of playing the part of great reformers? They cannot, of course, say for themselves what I say for them; but of what is really passing in the ecclesiastical minds of these great personages, I have no more doubt than I have of what Two or three persons have said to me- Why, af-passes in the mind of the prisoner when the prosecuter writing an entertaining and successful letter to Archdeacon Singleton, do you venture upon another, in which you may probably fail, and be weak or stu pid?' All this I utterly despise; I write upon these matters not to be entertaining, but because the subjects are very important, and because I have strong opinions upon them. If what I write is liked, so much the better; but liked or not liked, sold or not sold, Wilson Crokered or not Wilson Crokered, I will write. If you ask me who excites me, I answer you it is that judge who stirs good thoughts in honest hearts-under whose warrant I impeach the wrong, and by whose help I hope to chastise it.

There are, in most cathedrals, two sorts of prebendaries-the one resident, the other non-resident. It is proposed by the church commission to abolish all the prebendaries of the latter and many of the former class, the resident prebendaries, whom I wish to

tor recommends and relents, and the judge says he shall attend to the recommendation.

What harm does a prebend do, in a politico-economical point of view? The alienation of the property for three lives, or twenty-one years, and the almost certainty that the tenant has of renewing, give him sufficient interest in the soil for all purposes of cultivation, and a long series of elected clergymen is rather more likely to produce valuable members of the community than a long series of begotten squires. Take, for instance, the cathedral of Bristol, the whole estates of which are about equal to keeping a pack of foxhounds. If this had been in the hands of a country gentleman; instead of a precentor, succentor, dean, and canons,and sexton, you would have had huntsman, whipper-in, dog-feeders, and stoppers of earths; the old squire, full of foolish opinions, and fermented li quids, and a young gentleman of gloves, waistcoats, and pantaloons: and how many generations might it The non-resident prebendaries never come near the be before the fortuitous concourse of noodles would cathedral; they are just like so many country gentle- produce such a man as Professor Lee, one of the premen; the difference is, that their appointments are bendaries of Bristol, and by far the most eminent orielective, not hereditary. They have their houses, ental scholar in Europe? The same argument might manors, lands, and every appendage of territorial be applied to every cathedral in England. How many wealth and importance. Their value is very different. hundred coveys of squires would it take to supply as I have one, Neasdon, near Willesdon, which consists much knowledge as is condensed in the heads of Dr. of a quarter of an acre of land, worth a few shillings Copplestone, or Mr. Taite, of St. Paul's? and what a per annum, but animated by the burden of repairing a bridge, which sometimes costs the unfortunate prebendary fifty or sixty pounds. There are other nonresident prebendaries, however, of great value: and one I believe, which would be worth, if the years or lives were run out, from 40,000 to 60,000 per annum.

save.

* I meant no harm by the comparison, but I have made two bitter enemies by it.

The church, it has been urged, do not plant-they do not extend their woods; but almost all cathedrals possess woods, and regularly plant a succession, so as to keep them up. A single evening of dice and hazard does not doom cut down all the timber to make the most of his estate: the their woods to sudden destruction; a life tenant does not woods of ecclesiastical bodies are managed upon a fixed and settled plan, and considering the sudden prodigalities of laymen, I should not be afraid of a comparison.

strange thing it is that such a man as Lord John Rus- | moderate man, and, therefore, enough to satisfy him. sell, the whig leader, should be so squirrel-minded as self. What another generation may choose to do, is to wish for a movement without object or end! Sav-another question: I am thoroughly convinced that ing there can be none, for it is merely taking from one enough has been done for the present. ecclesiastic to give it to another; public clamour, to Viscount Melbourne declared himself quite satisfied which the best men must sometimes yield, does not with the church as it is; but if the public had any require it: and so far from doing any good, it would desire to alter it, they might do as they pleased. He be a source of infinite mischief to the establishment. might have said the same thing of the monarchy, or If you were to gather a parliament of curates on the of any other of our institutions; and there is in the hottest Sunday in the year, after all the services, ser- declaration a permissiveness and good humour which mons, burials, and baptisms of the day were over, and in public men have seldom been exceeded. Carelessto offer them such increase of salary as would be pro- ness, however, is but a poor imitation of genius; and duced by the confiscation of the cathedral property, I the formation of a wise and well-reflected plan of am convinced they would reject the measure, and pre- reform conduces more to the lasting fame of a minisfer splendid hope, and the expectation of good fortune ter than that affected contempt of duty which every in advanced life, to the trifling improvement of pover-man sees to be mere vanity, and a vanity of no very ty which such a fund could afford. Charles James, of high description. London, was a curate; the Bishop of Winchester was a curate; almost every rose-and-shovel man has been a curate in his time. All curates hope to draw great prizes.

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 chuck-farthing I am surprised it does not strike the mountaineers with human happiness; that he was always on the how very much the great emoluments of the church heel of pastime; that he would giggle away the great are flung open to the lowest ranks of the community. charter, and decide by the method of tee-totum wheButchers, bakers, publicans, schoolmasters, are per- ther my lords the bishops should or should not retain petually seeing their children elevated to the mitre. their seats in the House of Lords. All this is the Let a respectable baker drive through the city from mere vanity of surprising, and making us believe that the west end of the town, and let him cast an eye on he can play with kingdoms as other men can with the battlements of Northumberland House, has his lit- nine-pins. Instead of this lofty nebulo-this miracle tle muffin-faced son the smallest chance of getting in of moral and intellectual felicities-he is nothing more among the Percies, enjoying a share of their luxury than a sensible, honest man, who means to do his duty and splendour, and of chasing the deer with hound and to the sovereign and to the country: instead of being horn upon the Cheviot Hills? But let him drive his the ignorant man he pretends to be, before he meets alum-steeped loaves a little farther, till he reaches St. the deputation of tallow-chandlers in the morning, he Paul's churchyard, and all his thoughts are changed sits up half the night talking with Thomas Young when he sees that beautiful fabric: it is not impossible about melting and skimming, and then, though he has that his little penny roll may be introduced into that acquired knowledge enough to work off a whole vat of splendid oven. Young Crumpet is sent to school-prime Leicester tallow, he pretends next morning not takes to his books-spends the best years of his life, to know the difference between a dip and a mould. In as all eminent Englishmen do, in making Latin verses the some way, when he has been employed in reading -knows that the crum in crum-pet is long, and the pet acts of Parliament, he would persuade you that he has short-goes to the University-gets a prize for an Es- been reading Cleghorn on the Beatitudes, or Pickler on say on the Dispersion of the Jews-takes orders-be-the Nine Difficult Points. Neither can I allow to this comes a bishop's chaplain-has a young nobleman for minister (however he may be irritated by the denial) his pupil-publishes an useless classic, and a serious the extreme merit of indifference to the consequences call to the unconverted-and then goes through the of his measures. I believe him to be conscientiously Elysian transitions of prebendary, dean, prelate, and alive to the good or evil that he is doing, and that his the long train of purple, profit, and power. caution has more than once arrested the gigantic pro

sorry to hurt any man's feelings, and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared, but I accuse our minister of honesty and dili. gence; 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.

It will not do to leave only four persons in each ca-jects of the Lycurgus of the Lower House. I am thedral upon the supposition that such a number will be sufficient for all the men of real merit who ought to enjoy such preferment; we ought to have a steady confidence that the men of real merit will always bear a small proportion to the whole number; and that in proportion as the whole number is lessened, the number of men of merit provided for will be lessened also. If it were quite certain that ninety persons would be selected, the most remarkable for conduct, piety, and learning, ninety offices might be sufficient; but out of these ninety are to be taken tutors to dukes and marquises, paid in this way by the public; bishop's chaplains, running tame about the palace; elegant clergy. men, of small understanding, who have made themselves acceptable in the drawing-rooms of the mitre; Billingsgate controversialists, who have tossed and gored an Unitarian. So that there remain but a few rewards for men of real merit-yet these rewards do infinite good; and in this mixed, checkered way, human affairs are conducted.

One of the most foolish circumstances attending this destruction of cathedral property, is the great sacrifice of the patronage of the crown; the crown gives up eight prebends of Westminster, two at Worcester, £1,500 per annum at St. Paul's, two prebends at Bristol, and a great deal of other preferment all over the kingdom; and this at a moment when such extraordinary power has been suddenly conferred upon the people, and when every atom of power and patronage ought to be husbanded for the crown. A prebend of Westminster for my second son would soften the Catos of Cornhill, and lull the Gracchi of the metropolitan boroughs. Lives there a man so absurd as to suppose No man at the beginning of the reform could tell to that government can be carried on without those gen what excesses the new power conferred upon the mul- tle allurements. You may as well attempt to poultice titude would carry them; it was not safe for a clergy-off the humps of a camel's back, as to cure mankind man to appear in the streets. I bought a blue coat, of these little corruptions. and did not despair in time of looking like a layman. I am terribly alarmed by a committee of cathedrals All this is passed over. Men are returned to their now sitting in London, and planning a petition to the senses upon the subject of the church, and I utterly legislature to be heard by counsel. They will take deny that there is any public feeling whatever which such high ground, and talk a language so utterly at calls for the destruction of the resident prebends. variance with the feelings of the age about church preLord John Russell has pruned the two luxuriant bishop-perty, that I am afraid they will do more harm than rics, and has abolished pluralities: he has made a good. In the time of Lord George Gordon's riots, the very material alteration in the state of the church: Guards said they did not care for the mob, if the gennot enough to please Joseph Hume and the tribunes of tlemen volunteers behind would be so good as not to the people, but enough to satisfy every reasonable and 'hold their muskets in such a dangerous manner. I

don't care for popular clamour, and think it might now | taken to preserve the rights and property of the church be defied; but I confess the gentlemen volunteers alarm me. They have unfortunately, too, collected their addresses, and published them in a single volume !!!

44

so anxious to destroy; divide the diocese among the
members of the chapter, and make them responsible
for the superintendence and inspection of the clergy
in their various divisions under the supreme control ot
the bishop; by a few additions they might be made
the bishops' council for the trial of delinquent clergy-
men. They might be made a kind of college for the
general care of education in the diocese, and applied
to a thousand useful purposes, which would have oc-
curred to the commissioners, if they had not been so
dreadfully frightened, and to the government, if their
object had been, not to please the dissenters, but to
improve the church.

'The plan of taxation, therefore,' says the bishop, being abandoned, it was evident that the funds for the augmentation of poor livings, and for the supply of the spiritual wants of populous districts, must be drawn from the episcopal and cathedral revenues; that is, from the revenues from which the legislature seems to have a peculiar right to draw the funds for the general supply of the religious wants of the people; because they arise from benefices, of which the patronage is either actually in the crown, or is derivative from the crown. In the case of the episcopal reve nues, the commissioners had already carried the prin ciple of redistribution as far as they thought that it could, with due allowance for the various demands upon the incomes of the bishops, be carried. The oncathedral revenues: and the commissioners proceeded, in the execution of the duties prescribed to them, to consider in what manner those revenues might be rendered conducive to the efficiency of the established church.'

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

The Bishop of Lincoln has lately published a pamphlet on the church question. His lordship is certainly not a man full of felicities and facilities, imitatingly remaining source, therefore, was to be found in the none, and inimitable of any; nor does he work with infinite agitation of wit. His creation has blood with. out heat, bones without marrow, eyes without speculation. He has the art of saying nothing in many words beyond any man that ever existed; and when he seems to have made a proposition, he is so dreadfully frightened at it, that he proceeds as quickly as possible, in the ensuing sentence, to disconnect the subject and the predicate, and to avert the dangers he has incurred:-but as he is a bishop, and will be therefore more read than I am, I cannot pass him over. His lordship tells us, that it was at one time under-that, of seven chapter memorials addressed to the board. consideration of the commissioners whether they the receipt of one was only acknowledged. should not tax all benefices above a certain value, inmunications made to the commissioners as a body, either It is strictly within my province to acknowledge com order to raise a fund for the improvement of smaller directly or through me; and it is part of their general inlivings; and his lordship adds, with the greatest inno-structions to me that I should do so in all cases. cence, that the considerations which principally weighed with the commissioners in inducing them not to adopt the plan of taxation, was that they understood the clergy in general to be decidedly averse to it; so that the plan of the commission was, that the greater benefices should pay to the little, while the bishops themselves-the Archbishop of Canterbury with his 15,000l. a year, and the Bishop of London with his 10,000l. a year-were not to subscribe a single farthing for that purpose. Why does John, Bishop of Lincoln, mention these distressing schemes of the commission, which we are certain would have been met with a general yell of indignation from one end of the kingdom to another? Surely it must have occurred to this excellent prelate that the bishops would have been compelled, by mere shame, to have contributed to the fund which they were about to put upon the backs of the more opulent parochial clergy; surely a moment's reflection must have taught them that the safer method by far was to confiscate cathedral pro-ret domus intus." It is now clear how the commission has perty.

The idea of abandoning this taxation, because it was displeasing to the clergy at large, is not unentertaining as applied to a commission who treated the clergy with the greatest contempt, and did not even notice the communications from cathedral bodies upon the subject of the most serious and extensive confiscations.*

Spain. If the amiable Lord Glenelg were to leave us, we
should feel secure in our colonial possessions. If Mr.
Spring Rice were to go into holy orders, great would be the
joy of the three per cents. A decent good-looking head of
the government might easily enough be found in lieu of
Viscount Melbourne; but in five minutes after the depar-
ture of Lord John, the whole whig government would be
dissolved into sparks of liberality and splinters of reform.
There are six remarkable men, who, in different methods
and in different degrees, are now affecting the interests of
this country-the Duke of Wellington, Lord John Russell,
Lord Brougham, Lord Lyndhurst, Sir Robert Peel, and
O'Connell. Greater powers than all these are the phlegm
of the English people-the great mass of good sense and in-
telligence diffused among them-and the number of those
who have something to lose, and have not the slightest in-
tention of losing it.

To whatever extent, therefore, the statement may be true, or whatever may be its value, it is clear that it cannot attach to the commissioners, but that I alone am responsible.

the midst of my other duties, to conduct an extensive corIn the execution of my office, I have endeavoured, in respondence in accordance to what I knew to be the feelings and wishes of the commissioners, and to treat every party in communication with them with attention and res pect.

If, at some period of more than usual pressure, any ac-
cidental omission may have occurred, or may hereafter oc-
offer, as I now do, explanation and apology.
cur, involving an appearance of discourtesy, it is for me to

I am, sir, your obedient humble servant,
C. K. MURRAY."

"Whitehall Place, Jan. 21."

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. 'Sir.-A more indiscreet and extraordinary communica tion than that which appears in your own paper of the 23d instant, signed by Mr. C. K. Murray, I never read. Apra

been worked. Where communications from the oldest ec-
clesiastical bodies, upon the most important of all subjects
to them and to the kingdom, were received by the greatest
prelates and noblemen of the land, acting under the king's
commission, I should have thought that answers suitable to
the occasion would, in each case, have been dictated by the
commission; that such answers would have been entered
on the minutes, and read on the board-day next ensuing.
Is Mr. C K. Murray quite sure that this, which is done
at all boards on the most trifling subjects, was not done at
his board, in the most awful confiscation ever known in
England? Is he certain that spoliation was in no instance
sweetened by civility, and injustice never varnished by
forms? Were all the decencies and proprieties, which ought
to regulate the course of such great bodies, left without a
single inquiry from the commissioner, to a gentleman who
seems to have been seized with six distinct fits of oblivion
on six separate occasions, any one of which required all
that attention to decorum and that accuracy of memory for
which secretaries are selected and paid?

According to Mr. C. K. Murray's account, the only order he received from the board was, "If any preperdary calls, or any cathedral writes, desiring not to be destroyed, just say the communication has been received;" and even this, Mr. Murray tells us, he has not done, and that no one of the king's commissioners-archbishops, bishops, marquises, earls-ever asked him whether he had done it or Upon this subject I think it right to introduce the fol-not-though any one of these great people would have lowing letters, the first of which was published January swooned away at the idea of not answering the most tr fling communication from any other of these great people.

23, 1838:

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.
Sir, I feel it to be consistent with my duty, as secretary
to the church commissioners, to notice a statement emana-
ting from a quarter which would seem to give it authenticity

Whatever else these commissioners do, they had better not bring their secretary forward again. They may feel wind-bound by public opinion, but they must choose, as a sacrifice, a better Iphigenia than Mr. C. K. Murray.

SYDNEY SMITя."

ed with the greatest sharpness and accuracy, they
may squeeze 1-8th per cent. out of the Turkey Compa
ny; Spring Rice would become director of the Hydro-
impervious Association, and clear a few hundreds for
the treasury. The British Roasted Apple Society is
notoriously mismanaged, and Lord John and Brother
Lister, by a careful selection of fruit, and a judicious
management of fuel, would soon get it up to par.
I think, however, I have heard at the Political Econ-
omy Club, where I have sometimes had the honour of
being a guest, that no trades should be carried on by
governments. That they have enough to do of their
own, without undertaking other persons' business. If
any savings in the mode of managing ecclesiastical
leases could be made, great deduction from these sa-
vings must be allowed for the jobbing and Gaspillage
of general boards, and all the old servants of the
church, displaced by this measure, must receive com-
pensation.

The whig government, they will be vexed to hear, would find a great deal of patronage forced upon them by this measure. Their favourite human animal, the barrister of six years' standing, would be called into action. The whole earth is, in fact, in commission, and the human race, saved from the flood, are delivered over to barristers of six years' standing. The onus probandi now lies upon any man who says he is not a commissioner; the only doubt on seeing a new man among the whigs is, not whether he is a commissioner or not, but whether it is tithes, poor-laws, boundaries of boroughs, church leases, charities, or any of the thousand human concerns which are now worked by commissioners, to the infinite comfort and satisfaction of mankind, who seem in these days to have found out the real secret of life-the one thing wanting to sublu. nary happiness-the great principle of commission, and six years' barristration.

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 15,000l. per annum? Why is every future bishop of London to have a palace in Fulham, a house in St. James's Square, and 10,000l. 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 ob ject to all this; because I am sure that the method of prizes and blanks is the best method of supporting a church, which must be considered as very slenderly endowed, if the whole were equally divided among the parishes: but if my opinion were different-if Ĭ 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 15,000l. a-year, and make a fund by annihilating residentiaries at Bristol of 5001. 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 learnt how well and widely they pastured, and how they could be most conveniently eaten Then, if there is a better method of working ecclesiup, turns round and informs the cattle, who took him astical estates-if any thing can be gained for the for their best and tenderest friend, that he means to church-why is not the church to have it? why is it eat them up also. Frequently did Lord John meet the not applied to church purposes? what right has the destroying bishops; much did he commend their daily state to seize it? If I give you an estate, I give it you heaps of ruins; sweetly did they smile on each other, not only in its present state, but I give to you all the and much charming talk was there of meteorology improvements which can be made upon it-all that and catarrh, and the particular cathedral they were mechanical, botanical, and chemical knowledge may do pulling down at each period; till one fine day, the hereafter for its improvement-all the ameliorations home secretary, with a voice more bland, and a look which care and experience can suggest, in setting, immore ardently affectionate, than that which the mas- proving, and collecting your rents. Can there be such culine mouse bestows on his nibbling female, informed miserable equivocation as to say-I leave you your them that the government meant to take all the property, but I do not leave to you all the improvechurch property into their own hands, to pay the rates ments which your own wisdom, or the wisdom of your out of it, and deliver the residue to the rightful posses- fellow-creatures, will enable you to make of your prosors. Such an effect, they say, was never before property? How utterly unworthy of a whig government duced by a coup de theatre. 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?

But, after all, what a proposition ! 'You don't make the most of your money: I will take your property into my hands, and see if I cannot squeeze a penny out of it: you shall be regularly paid all you now receive, only if any thing more can be made of it, that we will put into our own pockets. Just pull off your neckcloth, and lay your head under the guillotine, and I will promise not to do you any harm: just get ready for confiscation; give up the management of all your property; make us the ostensible managers of every thing; let us be informed of the most minute value of all, and depend upon it, we will never injure you to the extent of a single farthing.'- Let me get my arms about you,' says the bear; I have not the smallest intention of squeezing you.'-Trust your finger in my mouth,' says the mastiff; I will not fetch blood.'

is such a distinction as this!

Suppose the same sort of plan had been adopted in the reign of Henry VIII., and the legislature had said,-You shall enjoy all you now have, but every farthing of improved revenue, after this period, shall go into the pocket of the state-it would have been impossible by this time that the church could have existed at all: and why may not such a measure be as fatal hereafter to the existence of a church, as it would have been to the present generation, if it had been brought forward at the time of the Reformation?

There is some safety in dignity. A church is in danger when it is degraded. It costs mankind much less to destroy it when an institution is associated with mean, and not with elevated ideas. I should like to see the subject in the hands of H. B. I would entitle the print

'The Bishops' Saturday Night; or, Lord John Russell at the Pay-Table.'

The bishops should be standing before the pay-table, and receiving their weekly allowance; Lord John and Spring Rice counting, ringing, and biting the sovereigns, and the Bishop of Exeter insisting that the Where is this to end? If government are to take chancellor of the exchequer had given him one which into their own hands all property which is not manag-kle, should be standing, with his hat on, and his back was not weight. Viscount Melbourne, in high chuc

What cathedral are we pulling down to day?' was the standing question at the commission.

to the fire, delighted with the contest; and the deans and canons should be in the back-ground, waiting till