offensive at present, being rather made to guard against future hostilities, than to begin any now. So, we shall have peace at home, and war abroad. If I were to write the History of my own Times, I would transcribe into it your character of the late king, and should thereby pay my debt of gratitude to his memory. I would only add to it, that it appears by several wills he has left, that he never had been such a hoarder of treasure as was generally supposed. And of what he had saved, this war has consumed so much, that he was able to leave no more to his three surviving children than thirty thousand pounds in equal proportions, and I have heard that the Duke has given up his to his sisters. Princess Emily is to come and live in my brother's house, like a private woman. It is said that the Princess of Wales will not come to St. James's. The great court officers are not yet settled, but I believe it is certain that Lord Bute will be continued Groom of the Stole, and Lord Huntington Master of the Horse. It was expected that the latter would rather have been disgraced than promoted to a cabinet office; but in a private audience he touched the good nature of the King, and has the benefit of the general disposition of the times, to let nobody complain or be discontented. The greatest difficulty is how to find an equivalent for my Lord Gower. Many changes are talked of on that account; but as I understand that nothing is fixed, I will not send you conjectures which may be falsified before my letter comes to you. The vis imperii is supposed to be in Mr. Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle; and I believe that their vis unita would be too strong for all opposition; but how long it will continue unita as much as it is now, or which of them would be most favoured by a third power, if they disagreed, time will shew.?' Mrs. Montagu's character of George II. to which Lord Lyttel ton alludes in such flattering terms, is not ill written, with the exception of the introductory sentence, which is execrable. shall conclude by transcribing it. "To Lord Lyttelton. We MY LORD, Newcastle, October 31st, 1760, It would be perfect sacrilege and robbing the mighty dead of his due rites, if one began one's letter with any subject but the loss of our sovereign; on which I condole with your Lordship, in whom the virtue of patriotism, and the antiquated one of loyalty still remain, I know you had that veneration for our late king, which the justice and prudence of his government so well deserved. With him our laws and liberties were safe; he possessed in a great degree the confidence of his people and the respect of foreign governments; and a certain steadiness of character made him of great consequence in these unsettled times. During his long reign we never were subject to the insolence and rapaciousness of favourites, a grievance of all others most intolerable, when persons born only one's equals, shall, by the basest means perhaps, possess themselves of all the strength of sovereign power, and keep their fellow subjects in a dependance on illegal authority, which insults while it subjects, and is more grievous to the spirits than even to the fortunes of freeborn men. If we consider only the evils we have avoided during his late majesty's reign, we shall find abundant matter of gratitude towards him, and respect for his memory. His character would not afford subject for epic poetry, but will look well in the sober page of history. Conscious, perhaps, of this, he was too little regardful of sciences and the fine arts; he considered common sense as his best panegyrist. The monarch whose qualities are brilliant enough to entitle him to glory, cultivates the love of the Muses, and their handmaid arts, painting, sculpture, &c. sensible that they will blazon and adorn his fame,'-yol, iv, p. 314. ART. III. Substance of the Speech of the Earl of Harrowby, on moving for the Recommitment of a Bill for the better Support and Maintenance of Stipendiary Curates. IT T is not without some apprehension of difficulties greater than we have been able to discover in this question, that we enter upon an examination of the Noble Earl's argument, on whom the task has devolved of bringing it under the notice of Parliament; and who has succeeded, notwithstanding the formidable opposition of nearly the whole bench of bishops, in carrying it through both Houses. The case is therefore a curious one, at least, and almost singular. That a question of wide extent, and of a nature purely ecclesiastical, should originate with laymen confessedly friendly to the Church establish ment-that it should derive no assistance or support from an order of men whose office and station require them more especially to watch over the interests of the church, and who seldom address the assembly in which they sit on any other occasions—that most of them, on the contrary, should have opposed it in every stage, without denying the existence of the evil complained of, and without offering any better remedy-that in spite of these obstacles, and of the general though suppressed murmur of the holders of church property, it should have passed into a law, are circumstances so strange as to excite more than ordinary surprise and curiosity. is obvious that some serious and weighty objections must be felt to the measure; but we seek in vain for any full and authentic statement of them in print. The scanty reports of debates have, indeed, furnished us with one or two objections, but those of so flimsy a nature, that we do not wouder they presented no obstruction whatever to the mass of fact and argument alleged on the other side. It It is perhaps to be regretted that none of the opponents of the bill thought it worth while, after the example of the noble Earl, to lay their view of the case before the public. The public, we think, had a right to something of this kind. No man, we will venture to assert, will call the noble Earl's case, prima facie, a bad one. No man will accuse him of giving it a false colour, of distorting or of exaggerating a single feature. It contains no appeal to the pas sions; no strain of sentiment, invective, or declamation. It is a plain unadorned business-like argument, resting upon documents of unquestioned authority, which have been analysed with care, and arranged with perspicuity. We think, therefore, that a speech addressed as this is, solely to the judgment and understanding, grave, compact, and closely reasoned, without digression or amplification, upon a subject of great national importance, if it failed of convincing, at least deserved an answer-not such an answer, as we are led by the newspapers to suppose was given; but a serious connected discourse, either disputing the facts, or detecting fallacies in the reasoning, or alleging such evils and disadvantages in the proposed measure as would outweigh the benefits intended by it. Even then we might expect, from the constitutional guardians of the church some project of similar tendency, by which the good might be attained with a less mixture of evil; something equally beneficial, but either more safe or more practicable. In the absence therefore of all attempts of this nature, we are left almost to conjecture the causes of this opposition; and as far as our fancy or the occasional hints of conversation will supply us, we shall proceed to consider the grounds upon which, we imagine, the bill was opposed in its passage, especially through the House of Lords. But in order to put our readers in possession of the whole case, we shall first lay before them an abstract of the noble mover's speech, following his own arrangement, as the most luminous, and the best which the subject will admit. Our readers will, we think, after this agree with us in demanding very powerful arguments on the other side, before they refuse to acquiesce in the necessity of some measure similar to that which the Parliament has thought fit to adopt. In the opening of his speech the noble lord combats the objection, urged we presume by very few, against the right of Parliament to legislate in this matter. If the right be denied, it cannot be on the abstract ground that the public are unconcerned in the provision made for the ministers of religion. This is too absurd to be for a moment maintained. The objection must rest therefore upon the established principles and practice of the English constitution; and by an appeal to these the question is soon settled. Before the period of the Reformation we find the salaries of curates frequently fixed by ecclesiastical authority, and in every faculty of dispensation issued subsequent to the 25. Hen. VIII. the salary to be granted is placed at the discretion of the bishop. The first direct interference,' Lord Harrowby says, ' of the legisla ture, of which I am aware, was in the 12th of Queen Anne, a period certainly not distinguished by peculiar indifference to the temporal coneerns of the church. By this act, the bishops were empowered to assign to every curate a salary not less than 207. nor more than 50l. in proportion to the greatness of the cure, and to the value of the benefices held by the incumbent. By another act, of the 36th of his present Majesty, the maximum was increased to 751. per ann. and the bishop was empowered to assign to the curate the parsonage-house, or an annual sum of 15l. in lieu thereof.'*-p. 5. Still less can the argument be admitted that regulations of this nature are infringements on the right of private property. Between church property and private freeholds there is this material difference: the one is absolute the other conditional. The rights both of patron and incumbent are by the law declared to be subordinate to the service of the church. If the patron do not present a clerk duly qualified in the bishop's estimation, or if he delay the presentation beyond a limited time, his right is forfeited. Again, the incumbent, if he neglect to perform the duty for which the profits of his living are assigned him, may by various legal processes be totally divested of his preferment: so that in the most essential points it differs in its character from property in a freehold estate; and any argument drawn from the one is inconclusive to the other, except it can be shewn that the peculiar conditions of the tenure are no wise involved in the supposed case. All property is the creature of law: and the law which creates it, limits also the mode and circumstances of its existence. The very permission of pluralities and non-residence is an indulgence of the law—an indulgence sparingly granted in the first instance, although it has now far exceeded the original intention, in consequence of events never contemplated when that law was passed. It is clear from the state of the peerage in Henry the VIIIth's time, that the number of chaplains of temporal peers entitled to a dispensation for pluralities could not have exceeded 200; whereas the number may now exceed 2000. If the legislature therefore should think fit to abridge this indulgence so as to bring it back more nearly to its original limits, or even to abolish it altogether, no man could reasonably contend that such a measure would be a violation of the private property of the patron. It would, like every other legislative question relating to the public interests, be a question of expediency and not of right. The patron's property still remains entire, subject, as it was before, to those regulations which are thought best adapted to attain the end of a church establishment. What these regulations The question has been several times entertained by Parliament, but no bill was ever passed till the 12th of Queen Anne. In the 9th of Elizabeth, a Bill for the Augmentation of poor Vicarages and Curacies was brought in and read a first time, after which we hear no more of it. In the 18th of the same reign, a Bill for the Relief of Vicars and Curates went as far as the Committee, and the next day the session was ended. Again, 13 C. II. a Bill for this purpose passed the House of Commons, but owing to the late period of the session at which it was introduced, never passed the Lords. are, are, is for the legislature, not for him, to judge: but hardly any man will deny, that one of them ought to be a decent support to the officiating minister, wherever the living is able to afford it. Such being the right and such the practice of Parliament, we have only to turn our attention to the facts collected from the bishops' returns of the state of their dioceses, in order to judge whether the present condition of the church requires that interference. Returns from all the dioceses have been received, except from that of St. David's. Why this has been withheld does not appear: and the circumstance seems to excite some surprize in the noble lord, and to call for explanation. The documents, however, already in possession of government, although deficient in certain particulars, are ample data for the inferences deduced from them. Abridged as they necessarily are in the speech itself, we shall feel it necessary to contract them into a still smaller compass: but we lay them before our readers in the full confidence that they will convince every unbiassed mind of the necessity of some legal provision on this subject. The whole number of places contained in the bishops' returns (including some dignities, sinecures, and dilapidated churches, but exclusive of the diocese of St. David's) is 10,261. The number of incumbents resident is 4421. The incumbents who do their own duty, although non-resident, are 960; making with the former 5381. The non-residents are of two kinds; those by exemption, and those by licence. Of the former class the number is 2671: of the latter, 2114: but besides these there is a miscellaneous class not reducible under either of those heads, amounting to 1055. From this statement it would appear that the whole number of places served by curates is 4870; but from this number must be deducted 40 dignities, 79 sinecures not requiring residence, and 39 dilapidated churches, leaving the number of curacies 4712. No return having been made of the salaries of curates where the incumbent is non-resident by exemption, which is the larger class, and many of the other returns being deficient in this respect, the salaries of only 1766 are known. But this number, taken without reference to any circumstance that can at all affect the question, is sufficiently high to serve as a measure for the rest. On so large a scale, it is fair to reason from the certain to the uncertain, especially where the cases are in every respect similar, and the average is found to lie at no great distance from either extreme. Of these 1766 then, there are |