cared about having one.  He was content with paying it an occasional visit at very rare intervals, and settled himself in comfortable quarters ’in the beautiful district on the banks of Winandermere.’  Here he employed his time ‘not,’ he proudly tells us, ’in field diversions and visiting.  No! it has been spent partly in supporting the religion and constitutions of my country, by seasonable publications, and principally in building farmhouses, blasting rocks, enclosing wastes, making bad land good, planting larches, &c.  By such occupations I have recovered my health, preserved my independence, set an example of a spirited husbandry, and honourably provided for my family.’

If we formed our estimate of Bishop Watson’s character simply from such samples as these, we might conclude that he was a covetous, unreasonably discontented, and worldly-minded man.  But this would be a very unfair conclusion to arrive at.  The Bishop gives us only one, and that the weakest side of his character.  He was most highly esteemed by some of his contemporaries, whose good opinion was well worth having.  Gibbon pays him a very high compliment, calling him ’his most candid as well as able antagonist.’  Wilberforce wrote to him in 1800 saying that ’he hoped ere now to be able to congratulate him on a change of situation which in public justice ought to have taken place.’  In 1797, Hayley wrote to him (saying it was Lord Thurlow’s expression), ’Your writings have done more for Christianity than all the bench of bishops put together.’[678] Lord Campden told Pitt that ’it was a shame for him and the Church that he had not the most exalted station upon the Bench.’  As in the case of Bishop Newton, one can only reconcile these anomalies by bearing fully in mind the low views which were commonly taken of clerical responsibilities, and the general scramble for the emoluments of the Church which was not thought unseemly in the eighteenth century.

One of the most characteristic specimens of the courtier prelate of the eighteenth century on whom so much abuse has been somewhat unfairly lavished both by contemporaries and by writers of our own time, who have dwelt exclusively upon the weak side of their character, was Bishop Hurd.  Hurd is now chiefly known as the devoted friend—­or rather the ’fidus Achates’—­of Warburton.  He was a man, however, who had a very distinct individuality of his own, and may be regarded as a fair representative of a type of bishop now extinct.  He was distinguished as a scholar, a divine, and a courtier.  When, however, it is said that Hurd was a courtier, it is not meant to imply that he was servile or in any way unduly complaisant to the King or the Court.  There is no evidence of anything of the sort.  Neither does he appear to have been, like some of his contemporaries, unduly intent upon advancing his own selfish interests.  His preferments came apparently unsought, and he refused the Primacy, although it was pressed upon him by the