“One of the most foolish circumstances attending this destruction of Cathedral property is the great sacrifice of the patronage of the Crown:  the Crown gives up eight Prebends of Westminster, two at Worcester, L1500 per annum at St. Paul’s, two Prebends at Bristol, and a great deal of other preferment all over the kingdom:  and this at a moment when such extraordinary power has been suddenly conferred upon the people, and when every atom of power and patronage ought to be husbanded for the Crown.  A Prebend of Westminster for my second son would soften the Catos of Cornhill, and lull the Gracchi of the Metropolitan Boroughs.  Lives there a man so absurd, as to suppose that Government can be carried on without those gentle allurements?  You may as well attempt to poultice off the humps of a camel’s back as to cure mankind of these little corruptions.

“I am terribly alarmed by a committee of Cathedrals now sitting in London, and planning a petition to the Legislature to be heard by counsel.  They will take such high ground, and talk a language so utterly at variance with the feelings of the age about Church Property, that I am much afraid they will do more harm than good.  In the time of Lord George Gordon’s riots, the Guards said they did not care for the mob, if the Gentlemen Volunteers behind would be so good as not to hold their muskets in such a dangerous manner.  I don’t care for popular clamour, and think it might now be defied; but I confess the Gentleman Volunteers alarm me.  They have unfortunately, too, collected their addresses, and published them in a single volume!!!"[125]

And now he returns to one of the prominent topics of his first Letter, and reminds the Archbishop of Canterbury that he has sworn to protect the rights and possessions of the Metropolitical Church of Canterbury.—­

“A friend of mine has suggested to me that his Grace has perhaps forgotten the oath; but this cannot be, for the first Protestant in Europe of course makes a memorandum in his pocket-book of all the oaths he takes to do, or to abstain.  The oath, however, may be less present to the Archbishop’s memory, from the fact of his not having taken the oath in person, but by the medium of a gentleman sent down by the coach to take it for him—­a practice which, though I believe it to have been long established in the Church, surprised me, I confess, not a little.  A proxy to vote, if you please—­a proxy to consent to arrangements of estates if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury Ply, to take the Creator to witness that the Archbishop, detained in town by business or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of piety over which he presides—­all this seems to me an act of the most extraordinary indolence ever recorded in history.  If an Ecclesiastic, not a Bishop, may express any opinion on the reforms of the Church, I recommend that Archbishops and Bishops should take no more oaths