One of the Bishops had emerged from silence and security to rebuke the correspondent of Archdeacon Singleton, and now he had his reward.—­

“You must have read an attack upon me by the Bishop of Gloucester,[128] in the course of which he says that I have not been appointed to my situation as Canon of St. Paul’s for my piety and learning but because I am a scoffer and a jester.  Is not this rather strong for a Bishop, and does it not appear to you, Mr. Archdeacon, as rather too close an imitation of that language which is used in the apostolic occupation of trafficking in fish?  Whether I have been appointed for my piety or not, must depend upon what this poor man means by piety.  He means by that word, of course, a defence of all the tyrannical and oppressive abuses of the Church which have been swept away within the last fifteen or twenty years of my life; the Corporation and Test Acts; the Penal Laws against the Catholics; the Compulsory Marriages of Dissenters, and all those disabling and disqualifying laws which were the disgrace of our Church, and which he has always looked up to as the consummation of human wisdom.  If piety consisted in the defence of these—­if it was impious to struggle for their abrogation, I have indeed led an ungodly life....  To read, however, his Lordship a lesson of good manners, I had prepared for him a chastisement which would have been echoed from the Segrave who banqueteth in the castle,[129] to the idiot who spitteth over the bridge at Gloucester.”

But the Bishop had made a rather misplaced appeal for compassion, on account of his failing eyesight; and Sydney, flinging him contemptuously on one side, passed on to the more formidable Bishop of London.—­

“I was much amused with what old Hermann says of the Bishop of London’s AEschylus.  ‘We find,’ he says, ’a great arbitrariness of proceeding, and much boldness of innovation, guided by no sure principle’; here it is:  qualis ab incepto.  He begins with AEschylus, and ends with the Church of England; begins with profane, and ends with holy innovations—­scratching out old readings which every commentator had sanctioned; abolishing ecclesiastical dignities which every reformer had spared; thrusting an anapaeest into a verse, which will not bear it; and intruding a Canon into a Cathedral, which does not want it; and this is the Prelate by whom the proposed reform of the Church has been principally planned, and to whose practical wisdom the Legislature is called upon to defer.  The Bishop of London is a man of very great ability, humane, placable, generous, munificent; very agreeable, but not to be trusted with great interests where calmness and judgment are required:  unfortunately, my old and amiable school-fellow, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has melted away before him, and sacrificed that wisdom on which we all founded our security....  Whatever happens, I am not to blame.  I have fought my fight.  Farewell”

A little later he wrote to an old friend:—­