for the clerical office was that when an undergraduate he had suffered from a stroke of palsy which partially crippled him, but “did not, however, prevent him from holding a hand at cards.”  Perhaps he had been, like Bishop Sumner, “bear-leader” to a great man’s son, and had won the gratitude of a powerful patron by extricating young hopeful from a matrimonial scrape.  Perhaps, like Marsh or Van Mildert, he was a controversial pamphleteer who had tossed a Calvinist or gored an Evangelical.  Or perhaps he was, like Blomfield and Monk, a “Greek Play Bishop,” who had annotated Aeschylus or composed a Sapphic Ode on a Royal marriage.  “Young Crumpet is sent to school; takes to his books; spends the best years of his life in making Latin verses; knows that the Crum in Crumpet 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 pupil; publishes a 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.”

Few—­and very few—­are the adducible instances in which, in the reigns of George III., George IV., and William IV., a bishop was appointed for evangelistic zeal or pastoral efficiency.

But, on whatever principle chosen, the bishop, once duly consecrated and enthroned, was a formidable person, and surrounded by a dignity scarcely less than royal.  “Nobody likes our bishop,” says Parson Lingon in Felix Holt.  “He’s all Greek and greediness, and too proud to dine with his own father.”  People still living can remember the days when the Archbishop of Canterbury was preceded by servants bearing flambeaux when he walked across from Lambeth Chapel to what were called “Mrs. Howley’s Lodgings.”  When the Archbishop dined out he was treated with princely honours, and no one left the party till His Grace had made his bow.  Once a week he dined in state in the great hall of Lambeth, presiding over a company of self-invited guests—­strange perversion of the old archiepiscopal charity to travellers and the poor—­while, as Sydney Smith said, “the domestics of the prelacy stood, 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.”  When Sir John Coleridge, father of the late Lord Chief Justice, was a young man at the Bar, he wished to obtain a small legal post in the Archbishop’s Prerogative Court.  An influential friend undertook to forward his application to the Archbishop.  “But remember,” he said, “in writing your letter, that his Grace can only be approached on gilt-edged paper.”  Archbishop Harcourt never went from Bishopthorpe to York Minster except attended by his chaplains, in a coach and six, while Lady Anne was made to follow in a pair-horse carriage, to show her that her position