inadequate qualifications have sustained an appalling diminution by the affection of my eyes, which have impaired my vision, and the progress of which threatens to consign me to darkness: I beg the benefit of your prayers to the Father of all mercies, that he will restore to me the better use of the visual organs, to be employed on his service; or that he will inwardly illumine the intellectual vision, with a particle of that Divine ray, which his Holy Spirit can alone impart." It might have been better taste, perhaps, if a mitred invalid, in describing his bodily infirmities before a church full of Clergymen, whose prayers he asked, had been a little more sparing in the abuse of his enemies; but a good deal must be forgiven to the sick. I wish that every Christian was as well aware as this poor Bishop of what he needed from Divine assistance; and in the supplication for the restoration of his sight and the improvement of his understanding, I most fervently and cordially join. says "We find," he I was much amused with what old Hermann of the Bishop of London's Eschylus. says, "a great arbitrariness of proceeding, and much boldness of innovation, guided by no sure principle;" here it is: qualis ab incepto. He begins with Eschylus, and ends with the Church of England; begins with profane, and ends with holy innovations-scratching out old readings which every commentator had sanctioned; abolishing ecclesiastical dignities which every reformer had spared; thrusting an anapast into a verse, which will not bear it; and intruding a Canon into a Cathedral, which does not want it; and this is the Prelate by whom the proposed reform of the Church has been principally planned, and to whose practical wisdom the Legislature is called upon to defer. The Bishop of London is a man of very great ability, humane, placable, generous, munificent; very agreeable, but not to be trusted with great interests where calmness and judgment are Ueber die Behandlung der Griechischen Dichter bei den Engländern. 394 THIRD LETTER TO ARCHDEACON SINGLETON. required; unfortunately, my old and amiable schoolfellow, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has melted away before him, and sacrificed that wisdom on which we all founded our security. Much writing and much talking are very tiresome; and, above all, they are so to men who, living in the world, arrive at those rapid and just conclusions which are only to be made by living in the world. This bill past, every man of sense acquainted with human affairs must see, that as far as the Church is concerned, the thing is at an end. From Lord John Russell, the present improver of the Church, we shall descend to Hume, from Hume to Roebuck, and after Roebuck we shall receive our last improvements from Dr. Wade: plunder will follow after plunder, degradation after degradation. The Church is gone, and what remains is not life, but sickness, spasm, and struggle. Whatever happens, I am not to blame; I have fought my fight. Farewell. SYDNEY SMITH. A LETTER, &c. MY LORD, THOUGH, upon the whole, your Residence and Plurality Bill is a good Bill, and although I think it (thanks to your kind attention to the suggestions of various Clergymen) a much better Bill than that of last year, there are still some important defects in it, which deserve amendment and correction. Page 13. Sect. 31.—It would seem, from this Section, that the repairs are to depend upon the will of the Bishop and not upon the present law of the land. A Bishop enters into the house of a non-resident Clergyman, and finds it neither papered, nor painted he orders these decorative repairs. In the mean time the Court of Queen's Bench have decided that substantial repairs only, and not decorative repairs, can be recovered by an Incumbent from his predecessor: the following words should be added:-"Provided always, that no other repairs shall be required by the Bishop, than such as any Incumbent could recover as dilapidations from the person preceding him in the said Benefice." Page 19. Sect. 42. Imcumbents are to answer questions transmitted by the Bishop, and these are to be countersigned by the rural Dean. This is another vexation to the numerous catalogue of vexations entailed upon the rural Clergy. Is every man to go before the rural Dean, twenty or thirty miles off, perhaps? Is he to go through a cross-examination by the rural Dean, as to the minute circumstances of twenty or thirty questions, to enter into reasonings upon them, and to |