[49] John Southey, 15th Lord Somerville, President of the Board of
    Agriculture.

[50] Spencer Perceval.

[51] Robert Bankes Jenkinson (1770-1820), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was Lord
    Hawkesbury from 1796 to 1808.

[52] Lord Hawkesbury was appointed Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports at a
    salary of L3000 a year.

[53] “The allusion is to the Orders in Council under which Mr. Perceval
    endeavoured to retaliate on Napoleon’s Baltic decree by regulating
    British trade with the Continent.  Under these orders the exportation
    of all goods to France was prohibited which were not carried from this
    country and had not paid an export-duty here.  But there were certain
    articles which the Minister decided that the Continent should have on
    no terms, and amongst others quinine, or Jesuit’s Bark, as it was
    called.  Sydney Smith, writing as Peter Plymley, said, ’You cannot
    seriously suppose the people to be so degraded as to look for their
    safety from a man who proposes to subdue Europe by keeping it without
    Jesuit’s Bark.’”—­SIR SPENCER WALPOLE, Life of Lord John
    Russell.

[54] In 1839 Sydney Smith pronounced this “a very unjust imputation on Lord
    Castlereagh.”  Robert Stewart (1769-1823), Viscount Castlereagh, became
    Marquis of Londonderry in 1821.

[55] Henry Addington (1757-1844), created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805.

[56] Spencer Perceval had recently taken a villa on Hampstead Heath, for
    the benefit of his wife’s health.

[57] Spencer Perceval’s elder brother, Charles George Perceval (1756-1840),
    was created Lord Arden in 1802.

[58] John Archibald Murray (1779-1859), a Judge of the Court of Session.

[59] In October 1844 Eugene Robin, reviewing Sydney Smith in the Revue
    des Deux Mondes, wrote as follows:—­“Cache sous le pseudonyme de
    Peter Plymley il adresse ces nouvelles provinciales a un
    reverend pasteur, qui est bien le parfait modele de la sottise
    protestante, la quintessence des docteurs Bowles et des archidiacres
    Nares.”

CHAPTER IV

FOSTON—­“PERSECUTING BISHOPS”—­BENCH AND BAR

At the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the most serious evil which beset the Church of England was the system of Pluralities and Non-Residence.  A prosperous clergyman might hold half-a-dozen separate preferments, and, as long as he paid curates to perform the irreducible minimum of public duty, he need never show his face inside his deserted parishes.  The ecclesiastical literature of the time abounds in quaint illustrations of the equanimity with which this system, and all its attendant evils, was regarded even by respectable and conscientious men.  Thomas Newton, the commentator on Prophecy,