which it is at the expense of maintaining a Clergy*." Bernard Gilpin, the Northern Apostle, thought it was well nigh as lawful to have two wives as two livings; but Gilpin was an honourable man, a sincere and devout Christian, and one whose life never gave the lie to his creed. Watson now hated the Church and all that belonged to it, except its revenues; and his commands to the poor parson of Windermere Church, never to read the Athanasian Creed in his presence, were given in pride of power rather than from any thought or anxiety for the souls of others. His proposed legislative enactments proceeded from the same, or from meaner motives. What a paradox is man! How infinite in contrarieties! As Dr. Watson he panted for an equality of ecclesiastical property, yet as a Peer of the Realm his heart was cold and his tongue listless! To Dr. Watson non-residence was an abomination, yet to the Bishop of Llandaff absenteeism was a virtue, and planting larches on the banks of Windermere a conscientious discharge of his duty as a Bishop of the Church of Christ. Before we leave this part of his character, we must notice the insinuation or rumour that he had, during Pitt's administration, the offer of the See of Carlisle. We ourselves would rather believe that Sir James Lowther never existed, than believe that he either directly or indirectly countenanced such See Life, 159. an idea. There is no positive evidence of the fact; and probabilities amounting to moral certainty are not to be outweighed by the bare suggestions of a distempered will. When the tone of the mind, the source of all thought and action, is once lowered or disordered, irregularity becomes the rule of life. He disposed of the estate Luther had devised to him almost immediately. Gibson and Gilpin would have returned it to the poor man's wife and family! He sat to Romney the painter, with a full knowledge that the man had deserted his poor wife in Kendal, to live in adultery with that Phryne— Nelson's evil genius. When a bishop, he collected together and published a volume of sermons, written by dissenters. He quarelled with, and insulted on his very death-bed, that mild and benevolent Christian-Preston, Bishop of Ferns, for accepting a bishopric. He revelled in the spoils of a Christian church, and yet accounted an Unitarian a Christian. He wrote of Pitt, after the grave had silenced all enmity but his, in the spirit of a relentless fiend. He wrote and spoke of the most virtuous of Queens in language that Paine would have scrupled at. He insulted the best of kings to his face, while he bowed and sued for grace at the levees of the Duke of York for his son's promotion. For every See that was vacant he directly or indirectly made application, and hated the man who got it, though he did not know him. He saw none but great people; he talked of none but great folks. In dress and in demeanour to the country people he was a coxcomb. He lived and died without one act of charity, friendship, or benevolence, to show that he had ever lived. Yet in his day he was a conspicuous man, and might have been a great one. Amentes estis, si multos in Cæsare Marios non videtis; Cavendum est a puero male succincto." As he had lived all his life for himself, and for himself alone, he did by the spoils of the Church, by legacies, and by his writings, amass a very large fortune-very large for one who began the world with a clog and a shoe (£.300), and was the founder of his own fortune. Calgarth Park and demesnes are now the property of his grandson. We have seen how he lived, let us now see how he died; for "A death bed's a detector of the heart; Truth is deposited with man's last hour, An honest hour and faithful to her trust; Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die*.” We frequently find from his own pen the expression, the original disease never left me, and the like; what this was in reality†, we know little more than what we have before suggested, and the fact that by means of James's Powders its attacks were defied, until he reached the venerable age of near threescore years and ten. In 1809, however, he was struck with paralysis, and from that time at intervals these strokes returned upon him; at last he sunk under them on the 4th July, 1816, and in the 79th year of his age. His son, Richard Watson, LL.B., Prebendary of Llandaff and Wells, who published his father's Life in 1817, says, "From this period (October 1813) the health of the Bishop of Llandaff rapidly declined; bodily exertion became extremely irksome to him; and though his mental faculties continued unimpaired, yet he cautiously refrained from every species of literary composition. The example of the Archbishop of Toledo was often before him, and the determination as frequently expressed, that his own prudence should exempt him from the admonition. of a Gil Blas." He left a numerous issue well provided for ; some of whom are ecclesiastics, and seem to have inherited, as regards non-residence and the like, the mantle of their late father. The man who can leave his Diocese to blast rocks on the banks of Windermere, or who can absent himself for twenty years together at the expense of the Church to live a life of frivolity at Boulogne, deserves the condemnation of every well-regulated mind. Les Evêques à la lanterne will not, rebus sic stantibus, be confined long to the streets of Paris. May our prophecy never be fulfilled! As we saw not the death-bed, we must reason from a knowledge of the human heart. But that knowledge assures us that if some Eugenius, when life's last tide was ebbing, in that honest hour,-that hour so faithful to her trust,-had drawn the curtain to take his last farewell, he would have heard the last breath, hanging on the trembling lip, struggling into accents not unlike these : "Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness! |