The third specimen (the reader must be warned or the fact may escape him!) is in rhyme. It is written to John Newton, and would suggest that the poet's relationship with that gentleman was not uniformly of the most solemn description:

MY VERY DEAR FRIEND,-I am going to send, that when you have read, you may scratch your head, and say, I suppose, there's nobody knows whether what I have got be verse or not ;-by the tune and the time, it ought to be rhyme, but if it be, did you ever see, of late or of yore, such a ditty before?

I have writ "Charity," not for popularity, but as well as I could, in hopes to do good; and if the Reviewer should say "to be sure the gentleman's Muse wears Methodist shoes, you may know by her pace and talk about grace, that she and her bard have little regard for the taste and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoidening play, of the modern day; and though she assume a borrowed plume, and now and then wear a tittering air, 'tis only her plan to catch, if she can, the giddy and gay, as they go that way, by a production on a new construction: she has baited her trap, and hopes to snap all that may come with a sugar plum."-His opinion in this will not be amiss ; 'tis what I intend, my principal end, and, if I succeed, and folks should read, till a few are brought to a serious thought, I shall think I am paid for all I have said and all I have done, though I have run many a time, after a rhyme, as far as from hence to the end of my sense, and by hook or crook, write another book, if I live and am here, another year.

I have heard before of a room with a floor laid upon springs, and such like things, with so much art in

every part, that when you went in you were forced to begin a minuet pace, with an air and a grace, swimming about, now in and now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of eight, without pipe, or string, or any such thing; and now I have writ, in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and, as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I had penn'd, which that you may do, ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your humble me.-W.C.

There we must leave our poet, gladder and better folk for having come across him; and confident that as long as Englishmen value adversity bravely faced and limitations bravely borne, as long as they rate highly in a man those characteristics which call out in others deep friendship and loving attachment, and as long as they count a pure and lofty Christianity the highest good-so long will William Cowper find an honoured niche upon English shelves.

BEILBY PORTEUS, BISHOP OF LONDON

I

Eighteenth century bishops-Beilby Porteus' career, a forerunner of modern episcopal activities-His Primary Visitation Charge to the London Diocese-Its references to Bishop Lowth, nonresidence of clergy, scarcity of Sunday services, Sunday-schools, Church singing-The Bishop's efforts for the better observance of Holy Days, etc., for the anti-slavery movement, and for Foreign Missions, especially the S.P.G. plantations in the West Indies.

HARD things have been said—and written of the second half of the eighteenth century. Two examples of stern criticism will suffice :

Bishoprics were given either for political services, or as the reward of apologetic or theological writing. The bishops were not expected to be organisers of religious energy, or earnest in pastoral work, and to such a point did some of them push this theory that they rarely appeared in their dioceses at all.1

While emphatically avoiding the extreme statements and sweeping assertions which have been too often made concerning the Hanoverian clergy, it is impossible to deny that many of the bishops were excessively worldly, culpably idle and negligent, and too often merely self-seeking political partisans.2 The evidence for such statements is overwhelming. And yet it is not for us to judge even Hanoverian 1 Wakeman's History of the Church of England.

2 C. S. Carter's English Church in the Eighteenth Century (p. 41).

bishops; for they were largely what their own generation expected and accepted contentedly enough. It is difficult to know quite what was cause and what was effect in the spiritual sloth of the age; difficult to know if the bishops were the cause or rather the result of the prevailing unspirituality. Much can be said for the latter view; in which case our condemnation dare hardly be in stronger terms than to say that they did not rise above the standard of their times.

There were exceptions to the rule. And-matters standing as they did-we are constrained to a greater admiration for those few prelates who rose above the conventional mercenary or literary conception of their office, and sought to be shepherds of Christ's flock. Of these the most honoured will always be Wilson, of Sodor and Man, who, in spite of repeated offers of rich advancement and pluralities, held to his island diocese with its £300 a year for fifty-eight years of incessant pastoral toil.

But Thomas Wilson died in the middle of the century, and by that time the number of spiritually-minded prelates had sensibly declined.

In the latter half of the century the palm for episcopal activity must be awarded to Dr. Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London from 1787 to 1808. From his position he had far wider opportunities of influence and service than Bishop Wilson; and, rising above the mercenary spirit which dominated his times, he used his episcopate not as a means of worldly enrichment or self-aggrandisement, but as a sphere of strenuous and self-denying labour.

The great Bishop Wilberforce is sometimes said to have revived the modern conception of the episcopal office with its endless round of toil and responsibility;