“Bishops live in high places with high people, or with little people who depend upon them.  They walk delicately, like Agag.  They hear only one sort of conversation, and avoid bold reckless men, as a lady veils herself from rough breezes.”

And for the Whig Government, which was consenting to all these attacks on the Church and the Chapters, Sydney had his parting word of reminiscent rebuke.—­

“I neither wish to offend them nor any body else.  I consider myself to be as good a Whig as any amongst them.  I was a Whig before many of them were born—­and while some of them were Tories and Waverers.[121] I have always turned out to fight their battles, and when I saw no other Clergyman turn out but myself—­and this in times before liberality was well recompensed, and therefore in fashion, and when the smallest appearance of it seemed to condemn a Churchman to the grossest obloquy, and the most hopeless poverty.  It may suit the purpose of the Ministers to flatter the Bench; it does not suit mine.  I do not choose in my old age to be tossed as a prey to the Bishops; I have not deserved this of my Whig friends.”

It is perhaps not surprising that the Whig Ministers should have remained impervious to arguments thus enforced.  On the 10th of February, Sydney Smith wrote to Lord John Russell (whom he addressed as “My dear John"):—­

“You say you are not convinced by my pamphlet I am afraid that I am a very arrogant person; but I do assure you that, in the fondest moments of self-conceit, the idea of convincing a Russell that he was wrong never came across my mind.  Euclid would have had a bad chance with you if you had happened to have formed an opinion that the interior angles of a triangle were not equal to two right angles.  The more poor Euclid demonstrated, the more you would not have been convinced.”

In 1838 Sydney Smith published a second Letter to the same Archdeacon:—­

“It is a long time since you 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 in order 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....  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."[122]

He now returns to the “Prebends” which the Commissioners propose to confiscate.  Some of these, he says, are properties of great value.  He instances one which will soon be worth between L40,000 and L60,000 a year.  Some of them are held by non-residentiary Prebendaries, who never come near the Cathedral, and who have no duty except to enjoy their incomes.  Those prebends Sydney Smith,