incur it in the poor-law bill, in the tithe bill, in the Not only do these prebendaries do nothing, and are corporation bill, and in the circumscription of the Irish never seen, but the existence of the preferment, is Protestant Church. In all these matters, the whig mi-hardly known; and the abolition of the preferment, nistry, after the heat of party is over, and when Jo- therefore, would not in any degree lessen the tempta. seph Hume and Wilson Croker are powdered into tion to enter into the church, while the mass of these the dust of death, will gain great and deserved fame. preferments would make an important fund for the imIn the question of the church commission they have provement of small livings. The residentiary prebenbehaved with the grossest injustice; delighted to see diaries, on the contrary, perform all the services of this temporary delirium of archbishops and bishops, the cathedral church; their existence is known, their scarcely believing their eyes, and carefully suppress- preferment coveted, and to get a stall, and to be preing their laughter, when they saw these eminent con- ceded by men with silver rods, is the bait which the servatives laying about them with the fury of Mr. ambitious squire is perpetually holding out to his se Tyler or Mr. Straw; they have taken the greatest cond son. What prebendary is next to come into res care not to disturb them, and to give them no offence: idence, is as important a topic to the cathedral town, 'Do as you like, my lords, with the chapters and the and ten miles around it, as what the evening or morn parochial clergy; you will find some pleasing morsels ing star may be to the astronomer. I will venture to in the ruins of the cathedrals. Keep for yourselves say, that there is not a man of good humour, sense, any thing you like-whatever is agreeable to you can- and worth, within ten miles of Worcester, who does not be unpleasant to us.' In the mean time, the old not hail the rising of Archdeacon Singleton in the horfriends of, and the old sufferers for, liberty, do not izon as one of the most agreeable events of the year. understand this new meanness, and are not a little as- If such sort of preferments are extinguished, a very tonished to find their leaders prostrate on their knees serious evil (as I have often said before) is done to before the lords of the church, and to receive no other the church-the service becomes unpopular, further answer from them than that, if they are disturbed in spoliation is dreaded, the whole system is considered their adulation, they will immediately resign! to be altered and degraded, capital is withdrawn from the church, and no one enters into the profession but the sons of farmers and little tradesmen, who would be footmen if they were not vicars or figure on the coach-box if they were not lecturing from the pulpit.

I remain,

My dear Sir,

With sincere good will and respect,

Yours,
SYDNEY SMITH.

But what a practical rebuke to the commissioners, after all their plans and consultations and carvings of cathedral preferment, to leave it integral, and unSINGLE-touched! It is some comfort, however, to me, to think that the persons of all others to whom this preservation of cathedral property would give the greatest pleasure, are the ecclesiastical commissioners themselves. Can any one believe that the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London really wishes for the confiscation of any cathedral property, or that they were driven to it by any thing but fear, mingled, perhaps, with a little vanity of playing the part of great reformers? They cannot, of course, say for themselves what I say for them; but of what is really passing in the ecclesiastical minds of these great personages, I have no more doubt than I have of what passes in the mind of the prisoner when the prosecutor recommends and relents, and the judge says he shall attend to the recommendation.

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 on the throne, to the curate who rideth upon the hackney horse. I began writing on the subject 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.

Two or three persons have said to me- Why, after writing an entertaining and successful letter to Archdeacon Singleton, do you venture upon another, in which you may probably fail, and be weak or stu pid? All this I utterly despise; I write upon these matters not to be entertaining, but because the subjects are very important, and because I have strong opinions upon them. 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. If you ask me who excites me, I answer you it is that judge who stirs good thoughts in honest hearts-under whose warrant I impeach the wrong, and by whose help I hope to chastise it.

There are, in most cathedrals, two sorts of prebendaries-the one resident, the other non-resident. It is proposed by the church commission to abolish all the prebendaries of the latter and many of the former class, the resident prebendaries, whom I wish to

What harm does a prebend do, in a politico-economical point of view? The alienation of the property for three lives, or twenty-one years, and the almost certainty that the tenant has of renewing, give him sufficient interest in the soil for all purposes of cultiva tion, and a long series of elected clergymen is rather more likely to produce valuable members of the com munity than a long series of begotten squires. Take, for instance, the cathedral of Bristol, the whole estates of which are about equal to keeping a pack of foxhounds. If this had been in the hands of a country gentleman; instead of a precentor, succentor, dean, and canons,and sexton, you would have had huntsman, whipper-in, dog-feeders, and stoppers of earths; the old squire, full of foolish opinions, and fermented li quids, and a young gentleman of gloves, waistcoats, and pantaloons and how many generations might it The non-resident prebendaries never come near the be before the fortuitous concourse of noodles would cathedral; they are just like so many country gentle. produce such a man as Professor Lee, one of the premen; the difference is, that their appointments are bendaries of Bristol, and by far the most eminent orielective, not hereditary. They have their houses, ental scholar in Europe? The same argument might manors, lands, and every appendage of territorial be applied to every cathedral in England. How many wealth and importance. Their value is very different. hundred coveys of squires would it take to supply as I have one, Neasdon, near Willesdon, which consists much knowledge as is condensed in the heads of Dr. of a quarter of an acre of land, worth a few shillings Copplestone, or Mr. Taite, of St. Paul's? and what 'a per annum, but animated by the burden of repairing a bridge, which sometimes costs the unfortunate prebendary fifty or sixty pounds. There are other nonresident prebendaries, however, of great value: and one I believe, which would be worth, if the years or lives were run out, from 40,000 to 60,000 per annum.

save.

⚫ I meant no harm by the comparison, but I have made two bitter enemies by it.

The church, it has been urged, do not plant-they do not extend their woods; but almost all cathedrals possess woods, and regularly plant a succession, so as to keep them up. A single evening of dice and hazard does not doom their woods to sudden destruction; a life tenant does not cut down all the timber to make the most of his estate: the woods of ecclesiastical bodies are managed upon a fixed and settled plan, and considering the sudden prodigalities of laymen, I should not be afraid of a comparison.

strange thing it is that such a man as Lord John Rus- | moderate man, and, therefore, enough to satisfy him sell, the whig leader, should be so squirrel-minded as self. What another generation may choose to do, is to wish for a movement without object or end! Sav-another question: I am thoroughly convinced that ing there can be none, for it is merely taking from one | enough has been done for the present. ecclesiastic to give it to another; public clamour, to which the best men must sometimes yield, does not require it and so far from doing any good, it would be a source of infinite mischief to the establishment. If you were to gather a parliament of curates on the hottest Sunday in the year, after all the services, sermons, burials, and baptisms of the day were over, and to offer them such increase of salary as would be produced by the confiscation of the cathedral property, I am convinced they would reject the measure, and prefer splendid hope, and the expectation of good fortune in advanced life, to the trifling improvement of poverty which such a fund could afford. Charles James, of London, was a curate; the Bishop of Winchester was a curate; almost every rose-and-shovel man has been a curate in his time. All curates hope to draw great prizes.

Viscount Melbourne declared himself quite satisfied with the church as it is; but if the public had any desire to alter it, they might do as they pleased. He might have said the same thing of the monarchy, or of any other of our institutions; and there is in the declaration a permissiveness and good humour which in public men have seldom been exceeded. Carelessness, however, is but a poor imitation of genius; and the formation of a wise and well-reflected plan of reform conduces more to the lasting fame of a minister than that affected contempt of duty which every man sees to be mere vanity, and a vanity of no very high description.

But, if the truth must be told, our viscount is somewhat of an impostor. Everything about him seems to betoken careless desolation: any one would suppose from his manner that he was playmg chuck-farthing I am surprised it does not strike the mountaineers with human happiness; that he was always on the how very much the great emoluments of the church heel of pastime; that he would giggle away the great are flung open to the lowest ranks of the community. charter, and decide by the method of tee-totum wheButchers, bakers, publicans, schoolmasters, are per- ther my lords the bishops should or should not retain petually seeing their children elevated to the mitre. their seats in the House of Lords. All this is the Let a respectable baker drive through the city from mere vanity of surprising, and making us believe that the west end of the town, and let him cast an eye on he can play with kingdoms as other men can with the battlements of Northumberland House, has his lit- nine-pins. Instead of this lofty nebulo-this miracle tle muffin-faced son the smallest chance of getting in of moral and intellectual felicities-he is nothing more among the Percies, enjoying a share of their luxury than a sensible, honest man, who means to do his duty and splendour, and of chasing the deer with hound and to the sovereign and to the country: instead of being horn upon the Cheviot Hills? But let him drive his the ignorant man he pretends to be, before he meets alum-steeped loaves a little farther, till he reaches St. the deputation of tallow-chandlers in the morning, he Paul's churchyard, and all his thoughts are changed sits up halt the night talking with Thomas Young when he sees that beautiful fabric: it is not impossible about melting and skimming, and then, though he has that his little penny roll may be introduced into that acquired knowledge enough to work off a whole vat of splendid oven. Young Crumpet is sent to school-prime Leicester tallow, he pretends next morning not takes to his books-spends the best years of his life, to know the difference between a dip and a mould. In as all eminent Englishmen do, in making Latin verses the same way, when he has been employed in reading knows that the crum in crum-pet is long, and the pet acts of Parliament, he would persuade you that he has short-goes to the University-gets a prize for an Es- been reading Cleghorn on the Beatitudes, or Pickler on say on the Dispersion of the Jews-takes orders-be- the Nine Difficult Points. Neither can I allow to this comes a bishop's chaplain-has a young nobleman for minister (however he may be irritated by the denial) his pupil-publishes an useless classic, and a serious the extreme merit of indifference to the consequences call to the unconverted-and then goes through the of his measures. I believe him to be conscientiously Elysian transitions of prebendary, dean, prelate, and alive to the good or evil that he is doing, and that his the long train of purple, profit, and power. caution has more than once arrested the gigantic proIt will not do to leave only four persons in each ca-jects of the Lycurgus of the Lower House. I am thedral upon the supposition that such a number will sorry to hurt any man's feelings, and to brush away be sufficient for all the men of real merit who ought to the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has enjoy such preferment; we ought to have a steady confidence that the men of real merit will always bear a small proportion to the whole number; and that in proportion as the whole number is lessened, the number of men of merit provided for will be lessened also. If it were quite certain that ninety persons would be One of the most foolish circumstances attending this selected, the most remarkable for conduct, piety, and destruction of cathedral property, is the great sacrifice learning, ninety offices might be sufficient; but out of of the patronage of the crown; the crown gives up these ninety are to be taken tutors to dukes and mar- eight prebends of Westminster, two at Worcester, quises, paid in this way by the public; bishop's chap- £1,500 per annum at St. Paul's, two prebends at Bris. lains, running tame about the palace; elegant clergy-tol, and a great deal of other preferment all over the men, of small understanding, who have made them- kingdom; and this at a moment when such extraordiselves acceptable in the drawing-rooms of the mitre; nary power has been suddenly conferred upon the peoBillingsgate controversialists, who have tossed and ple, and when every atom of power and patronage gored an Unitarian. So that there remain but a few ought to be husbanded for the crown. A prebend of rewards for men of real merit-yet these rewards do Westminster for my second son would soften the Catos infinite good; and in this mixed, checkered way, hu- of Cornhill, and lull the Gracchi of the metropolitan man affairs are conducted. boroughs. Lives there a man so absurd as to suppose No man at the beginning of the reform could tell to that government can be carried on without those gen what excesses the new power conferred upon the mul- tle allurements. You may as well attempt to poultice titude would carry them; it was not safe for a clergy-off the humps of a camel's back, as to cure mankind man to appear in the streets. I bought a blue coat, of these little corruptions. and did not despair in time of looking like a layman. I am terribly alarmed by a committee of cathedrals All this is passed over. Men are returned to their now sitting in London, and planning a petition to the senses upon the subject of the church, and I utterly legislature to be heard by counsel. They will take deny that there is any public feeling whatever which such high ground, and talk a language so utterly at calls for the destruction of the resident prebends. variance with the feelings of the age about church proLord John Russell has pruned the two luxuriant bishop-perty, that I am afraid they will do more harm than rics, and has abolished pluralities: he has made a good. In the time of Lord George Gordon's riots, the very material alteration in the state of the church: Guards said they did not care for the mob, if the gennot enough to please Joseph Hume and the tribunes of tlemen volunteers behind would be so good as not to he people, but enough to satisfy every reasonable and hold their muskets in such a dangerous manner. I

reared, but I accuse our minister of honesty and dili gence; I deny that he is careless or rash he is nothing more than a man of good understanding, and good principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political roué.

don't care for popular clamour, and think it might now | taken to preserve the rights and property of the church be defied; but I confess the gentlemen volunteers alarm me. They have unfortunately, too, collected their addresses, and published them in a single volume !!!

ous.

I should like to know how many of our institutions at this moment, besides the cathedrais, are under notice of destruction. I will, before I finish my letter, endeavour to procure a list; in the mean time I will give you the bill of fare with which the last session opened, and I think that of 1838 will not be less copiBut at the opening of the session of 1837, when I addressed my first letter to you, this was the state of our intended changes:-The law of copyright was to be recreated by Serjeant Talfourd; church-rates abolished by Lord John Russell, and imprisonment for debt by the attorney-general; the Archbishop of Canterbury kindly undertook to destroy all the cathedrals, and Mr. Grote was to arrange our voting by ballot; the septennial act was to be repealed by Mr. Wil. liams-corn-laws abolished by Mr. Clay-and the House of Lords reformed by Mr. Ward; Mr. Hume remodelled country-rates-Mr. Ewart put an end to primogeniture, and Mr. Tooke took away the exclusive privileges of Dublin, Oxford, and Cambridge; Thomas Duncombe was to put an end to the proxies of the lords, and Sergeant Prime to turn the universities topsy-turvy. Well may it be said that

'Man never continueth in one stay.'

See how men accustom themselves to large and perilous changes. Ten years ago, if a cassock or a hassock had been taken from the establishment, the current of human affairs would have been stopped till restitution had been made. In a fortnight's time, Lord John Russell is to take possession of, and to repartition all the cathedrals in England; and what a prelude for the young queen's coronation! what a medal for the august ceremony!--the fallen Gothic buildings on one side of the gold, the young Protestant queen on the other :

Victoria Ecclesiæ Victrix.'

And then, when she is full of noble devices, and of all sorts enchantingly beloved, and amid the solemn swell of music, when heart beats happily, and her eyes look majesty, she turns them on the degraded ministers of the Gospel, and shudders to see she is stalking to the throne of her Protestant ancestors over the broken altars of God,

of Canterbury: I am quite sure so truly good a man, as from the bottom of my heart I believe him to be, has some line of argument by which he defends him. self; but till I know it, I cannot of course say I am convinced by it. The common defence for breaking oaths is, that they are contracts made with another party, which the Creator is called to witness, and from which the swearer is absolved, if those for whom the oath is taken choose to release him from his obligation. With whom, then, is the contract made by the archbishop? Is it with the community at large? If so, nothing but an act of Parliament (as the community at large have no other organ) could absolve him from his oath; but three years before any act is passed, he puts his name to a plan for taking away two-thirds of the property of the church of Canterbury. If the contract is not inade with the community at large, but with the church of Canterbury, every member of it is in decided hostility to his scheme. O'Connell takes an oath that he will not injure nor destroy the Protestant church; but in promoting the destruction of some of the Irish bishoprics, he may plead that he is sacrificing a part to preserve the whole, and benefiting, not injur ing, the Protestant establishment. But the archbishop does not swear to a general truth, where the principle may be preserved, though there is an apparent deviation from the words; but he swears to a very narrow and limited oath, that he will not alienate the possessions of the 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 pleasea proxy to consent to arrangements of estates, if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury fly, 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 by proxy; but, as they do not wait upon the sovereign or the prime min ister, or even any of the cabinet, by proxy, that they should also perform all religious acts in their own per son. This practice would have been abolished in Lord John's first bill, if other grades of churchmen as well as bishops had been made commissioners. But the motto was

'Peace to the palaces-war to the manses.'

Now, remember, I hate to overstate my case. I do not say that the destruction of cathedrals will put an end to railroads: I believe that good mustard and cress, sown after Lord John's bill is passed, will, if duly watered, continue to grow. I do not say that the country has no right, after the death of individual incumbents, to do what they propose to do ;-I merely say that it is inexpedient, uncalled for, and mischievous, that the lower clergy, for whose sake it is proposed to be done, do not desire it,-that the bishop commissioners, who proposed it, would be heartily I have been informed, though I will not answer for glad if it was put an end to,-that it will lower the the accuracy of the information, that this vicarious character of those who enter into the church, and oath is likely to produce a scene which would have accustom the English people to large and dangerous puzzled the Ductor Dubitantium. The attorney, who confiscations and I would not have gentlemen of the took the oath for the archbishop, is, they say, seized money-bags, and of wheat and bean land, forget that with religious horrors at the approaching confiscation the church means many other things than Thirty-nine of Canterbury property, and has in vain tendered back Articles, and a discourse of five-and-twenty minutes' his 6s. Sd. for taking the oath. The archbishop refu duration on the Sabbath. It means a check to the ses to accept it; and feeling himself light and disenconceited rashness of experimental reasoners--an ad- cumbered, wisely keeps the saddle upon the back of hesion to old moral landmarks-an attachment to the the writhing and agonizing scrivener. I have talked happiness we have gained from tried institutions, it over with several clergymen, and the general opingreater than the expectation of that which is promised by novelty and change. The loud cry of ten thousand teachers of justice and worship-that cry which masters the Borgias and Catalines of the world, and guards from devastation the best works of God—'

Magnâ testantur voce per orbem Discite justitiam moniti et non temnere divos.

In spite of his uplifted chess-board, I cannot let my old school-fellow, the Archbishop of Canterbury, off, without harping a little upon his oath, which he has

ion is, that the scrivener will suffer.

I cannot help thinking that a great opportunity opens itself for improving the discipline of the church, by means of those chapters which Lord John Russell* is

I only mention Lord John Russell's name so often, because the management of the church measures devolves upon him. He is, beyond all comparison, the ablest man in the whole administration, and to such a degree is he superior, that the government could not exist a moment without him. If the foreign secretary were to retire, we should no longer be nibbling ourselves into disgrace on the coast of

'The plan of taxation, therefore,' says the bishop so anxious to destroy; divide the diocese among the members of the chapter, and make them responsible being abandoned, it was evident that the funds for for the superintendence and inspection of the clergy the augmentation of poor livings, and for the supply in their various divisions under the supreme control of ( of the spiritual wants of populous districts, must be the bishop; by a few additions they might be made drawn from the episcopal and cathedral revenues; that the bishops' council for the trial of delinquent clergy- is, from the revenues from which the legislature seems men. They might be made a kind of college for the to have a peculiar right to draw the funds for the gen. general care of education in the diocese, and applied eral supply of the religious wants of the people; be to a thousand useful purposes, which would have oc- cause they arise from benefices, of which the patro curred to the commissioners, if they had not been so nage is either actually in the crown, or is derivative dreadfully frightened, and to the government, if their from the crown. In the case of the episcopal reve object had been, not to please the dissenters, but to nues, the commissioners had already carried the prin ciple of redistribution as far as they thought that it improve the church. could, with due allowance for the various demands upon the incomes of the bishops, be carried.

The on

The Bishop of Lincoln has lately published a pamphlet on the church question. His lordship is certainly not a man full of felicities and facilities, imitatingly remaining source, therefore, was to be found in the none, and inimitable of any; nor does he work with cathedral revenues: and the commissioners proceeded, infinite agitation of wit. His creation has blood with. in the exécution of the duties prescribed to them, to out heat, bones without marrow, eyes without specu- consider in what manner those revenues might be renlation. He has the art of saying nothing in many dered conducive to the efficiency of the established words beyond any man that ever existed; and when church.' he seems to have made a proposition, he is so dread- This is very good episcopal reasoning; but is it true? fully frightened at it, that he proceeds as quickly as The bishops and commissioners wanted a fund to enpossible, in the ensuing sentence, to disconnect the dow small livings; they did not touch a farthing of subject and the predicate, and to avert the dangers he their own incomes, only distributed them a little more has incurred:-but as he is a bishop, and will be there- equally; and proceeded lustily at once to confiscate fore more read than I am, I cannot pass him over. -that, of seven chapter memorials addressed to the board. His lordship tells us, that it was at one time under consideration of the commissioners whether they the receipt of one was only acknowledged. It is strictly within my province to acknowledge com should not tax all benefices above a certain value, in munications made to the commissioners as a body, either order to raise a fund for the improvement of smaller directly or through me; and it is part of their general inlivings; and his lordship adds, with the greatest inno-structions to me that I should do so in all cases. cence, that the considerations which principally weighed with the commissioners in inducing them not to adopt the plan of taxation, was that they understood the clergy in general to be decidedly averse to it; so that the plan of the commission was, that the greater benefices should pay to the little, while the bishops themselves-the Archbishop of Canterbury with his 15,000l. a year, and the Bishop of London with his 10,0007. a year-were not to subscribe a single farthing for that purpose. Why does John, Bishop of Lincoln, mention these distressing schemes of the commission, which we are certain would have been met with a general yell of indignation from one end of the kingdom to another? Surely it must have occurred to this excellent prelate that the bishops would have been compelled, by mere shame, to have contributed to the fund which they were about to put upon the backs of the more opulent parochial clergy; surely a moment's reflection must have taught them that the safer method by far was to confiscate cathedral pro-ret domus intus.' It is now clear how the commission has perty.

The idea of abandoning this taxation, because it was displeasing to the clergy at large, is not unentertaining as applied to a commission who treated the clergy with the greatest contempt, and did not even notice the communications from cathedral bodies upon the subject of the most serious and extensive confiscations.*

Spain. If the amiable Lord Glenelg were to leave us, we should feel secure in our colonial possessions. If Mr. Spring Rice were to go into holy orders, great would be the joy of the three per cents. A decent good-looking head of the government might easily enough be found in lieu of Viscount Melbourne; but in five minutes after the departure of Lord John, the whole whig government would be dissolved into sparks of liberality and splinters of reform. There are six remarkable men, who, in different methods and in different degrees, are now affecting the interests of this country-the Duke of Wellington, Lord John Russell, Lord Brougham, Lord Lyndhurst, Sir Robert Peel, and O'Connell. Greater powers than all these are the phlegm of the English people -the great mass of good sense and intelligence diffused among them-and the number of those who have something to lose, and have not the slightest intention of losing it.

To whatever extent, therefore, the statement may be true, or whatever may be its value, it is clear that it cannot attach to the commissioners, but that I alone am res ponsible.

In the execution of my office, I have endeavoured, in the midst of my other duties, to conduct an extensive cor respondence in accordance to what I knew to be the feelings and wishes of the commissioners, and to treat every party in communication with them with attention and res pect.

If, at some period of more than usual pressure, any accidental omission may have occurred, or may hereafter occur, involving an appearance of discourtesy, it is for me to offer, as I now do, explanation and apology.

"I am, sir, your obedient humble servant, C. K. MURRAY'

'Whitehall Place, Jan. 21.'

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. 'Sir.-A more indiscreet and extraordinary communication than that which appears in your own paper of the 23d instant, signed by Mr. C. K. Murray, I never read. Appa

been worked. Where communications from the oldest ec

clesiastical bodies, upon the most important of all subjects to them and to the kingdom, were received by the greatest prelates and noblemen of the land, acting under the king's commission, I should have thought that answers suitable to the occasion would, in each case, have been dictated by the commission; that such answers would have been entered on the minutes, and read on the board-day next ensuing.

Is Mr. C K. Murray quite sure that this, which is done at all boards on the most trifling subjects, was not done at his board, in the most awful confiscation ever known in England? Is he certain that spoliation was in no instance sweetened by civility, and injustice never varnished by forms? Were all the decencies and proprieties, which ought to regulate the course of such great bodies, left without a single inquiry from the commissioner, to a gentleman who seems to have been seized with six distinct fits of oblivion on six separate occasions, any one of which required all that attention to decorum and that accuracy of memory for which secretaries are selected and paid?

"According to Mr. C. K. Murray's account, the only order he received from the board was, "If any prependary calls, or any cathedral writes, desiring not to be destroyed, just say the communication has been received;" and even this, Mr. Murray tells us, he has not done, and that no one of the king's commissioners-archbishops, bishops, marquises, earls-ever asked him whether he had done it or Upon this subject I think it right to introduce the fol-not-though any one of these great people would have lowing letters, the first of which was published January 23, 1838:

swooned away at the idea of not answering the most tri fling communication from any other of these great people. "Whatever else these commissioners do, they had better TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. not bring their secretary forward again. They may feel Sir, I feel it to be consistent with my duty, as secretary wind-bound by public opinion, but they must choose, as a to the church commissioners, to notice a statement emana-sacrifice, a better Iphigenia than Mr. C. K. Murray. SYDNEY SMITH.' ting from a quarter which would seem to give it authenticity

The bishops should be standing before the pay-ta. ble, and receiving their weekly allowance; Lord John and Spring Rice counting, ringing, and biting the sovereigns, and the Bishop of Exeter insisting that the Where is this to end? If government are to take chancellor of the exchequer had given him one which into their own hands all property which is not manag-kle, should be standing, with his hat on, and his back was not weight. Viscount Melbourne, in high chuc