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!

SECOND LETTER

TO

ARCHDEACON SINGLETON.

MY DEAR SIR,

Ir is a long time since you have heard from me, and in the mean time the poor Church of England has been trembling, from the bishop who sitteth upon the throne, to the curate who rideth upon the hackney horse. I 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.

Two or three persons have said to me-" Why, after writing an entertaining and successful letter to Archdeacon Singleton, do you venture upon another, in which you may probably fail, and be weak or stupid?" 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; and it is the prebendaries of the former class, the resident prebendaries, whom I wish to save. The non-resident prebendaries never come near the cathedral; they are just like so many country gentlemen; the dif

ference is, that their appointments are elective, not hereditary. They have houses, manors, lands, and every appendage of territorial wealth and importance. Their value is very different. I have one, Neasdon, near Willesdon, which consists of a quarter of an acre of land, worth a few shillings per annum, but animated by the burden of repairing a bridge, which sometimes costs the unfortunate prebendary fifty or sixty pounds. There are other non-resident prebendaries, however, of great value; and one I believe, which would be worth, if the years or lives were run out, from 40,000l. to 60,000l. per annum.

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 temptation to enter into the church, while the mass of these preferments would make an important fund for the improvement of small livings. The residentiary prebendaries, 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 morning 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 churchthe 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 untouched! It is some comfort, however, to me, to 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 confiscation of any cathedral property, or that they were driven to it by any thing but fear, mingled, 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 passes in the mind of the prisoner when the prosecutor 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 fox-hounds. If this had been in the hands of a country gentleman; instead of 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 liquids, and a young gentleman of gloves, waistcoats and pantaloons and how many generations might it be before the fortuitous concourse of noodles would produce such a man as Professor Lee, one of the prebendaries of Bristol, and by far the most eminent oriental scholar in Europe? The same argument might be applied to every cathedral in England. How many hundred coveys of squires would it take to supply as much knowledge as is condensed in the heads of Dr. Copplestone or Mr. Taite, of St. Paul's? and what a strange thing it is that such a man as Lord John Russell, the whig leader, should be so squirrel-minded as to wish for a movement without object or end! Saving there can be none, for it is merely taking from one ecclesiastic

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 their woods to sudden destruction; a life tenant does not cut down all the timber to make the most of his estate; the 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.

to give it to another; public clamour, to which the best men must sometimes yield, does not require it: and so far from doing any good, it would be a source of infinite mischief to the establishment.

If you were to gather a parliament of curates on the hottest Sunday in the year, after all the services, sermons, burials, and baptisms of the day were over, and to offer them such increase of salary as would be produced by the confiscation of the cathedral property, I am convinced they would reject the measure, and prefer splendid hope, and the expectation of good fortune in advanced life, to the trifling improvement of poverty which such a fund could afford. Charles James, of 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.

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 muffinfaced 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 alum-steeped loaves a little farther, till he reaches St. Paul's churchyard, 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 crum-pet 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 pupilpublishes an 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.

It will not do to leave only four persons in each cathedral upon the supposition that such a number will be sufficient for all the men of real merit who ought to enjoy such preferment;