was not the same thing among women that her husband’s was among men.  At Durham, which was worth L40,000 a year, the Bishop, as Prince Palatine, exercised a secular jurisdiction, both civil and criminal, and the Commission at the Assizes ran in the name of “Our Lord the Bishop.”  At Ely, Bishop Sparke gave so many of his best livings to his family that it was locally said that you could find your way across the Fens on a dark night by the number of little Sparkes along the road.  When this good prelate secured a residential canonry for his eldest son, the event was so much a matter of course that he did not deem it worthy of special notice; but when he secured a second canonry for his second son, he was so filled with pious gratitude that, as a thank-offering, he gave a ball at the Palace of Ely to all the county of Cambridge.  “And I think,” said Bishop Woodford, in telling me the story, “that the achievement and the way of celebrating it were equally remarkable.”

This grand tradition of mingled splendour and profit ran down, in due degree, through all ranks of the hierarchy.  The poorer bishoprics were commonly held in conjunction with a rich deanery or prebend, and not seldom with some important living; so that the most impecunious successor of the Apostles could manage to have four horses to his carriage and his daily bottle of Madeira.  Not so splendid as a palace, but quite as comfortable, was a first-class deanery.  A “Golden Stall” at Durham or St. Paul’s made its occupant a rich man.  And even the rectors of the more opulent parishes contrived to “live,” as the phrase went, “very much like gentleman.”

The old Prince Bishops are as extinct as the dodo.  The Ecclesiastical Commission has made an end of them.  Bishop Sumner of Winchester, who died in 1874, was the last of his race.  But the dignified country clergyman, who combined private means with a rich living, did his county business in person, and performed his religious duties by deputy, survived into very recent times.  I have known a fine old specimen of this class—­a man who never entered his church on a week-day, nor wore a white neckcloth except on Sunday; who was an active magistrate, a keen sportsman, an acknowledged authority on horticulture and farming; and who boasted that he had never written a sermon in his life, but could alter one with any man in England—­which, in truth, he did so effectively that the author would never have recognized his own handiwork.  When the neighbouring parsons first tried to get up a periodical “clerical meeting” for the study of theology, he responded genially to the suggestion:  “Oh yes; I think it sounds a capital thing, and I suppose we shall finish up with a rubber and a bit of supper.”

The reverence in which a rector of this type was held, and the difference, not merely of degree but of kind, which was supposed to separate him from the inferior order of curates, were amusingly exemplified in the case of an old friend of mine.  Returning to his parish after his autumn holiday, and noticing a woman at her cottage door with a baby in her arms, he asked, “Has that child been baptised?” “Well, sir,” replied the curtsying mother, “I shouldn’t like to say as much as that; but your young man came and did what he could.”