We have found these volumes highly interesting, not merely from the importance of their period, but from their containing events so curiously parallel to those of our own time. Among the rest was the appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. A letter from Charles Yorke thus says:—“The Archbishop of Canterbury died suddenly on Saturday. The Bishop of London has declined the offer of succeeding. It is now offered to the Bishop of Salisbury, who has not yet returned an answer. If he refuses, which some say he will, the Archbishop of York will be the man.” The reasons for these refusals were probably the reluctance to change, at the advanced age of these bishops,—Sherlock, of Salisbury, being seventy, and Gibson probably about the same age. The fees for possession are also immense, and we have heard them rated at little short of £20,000. The Lord Chancellor announced the offer to the Archbishop of York, who returned the following remarkable answer:—“I am honoured with your Lordship’s of the 13th inst., which I embrace with all my heart, as a new instance of that friendship and affection for me which for so many years have been the support, and credit, and comfort of my life. “I have considered the thing, my best friend and my most honoured Lord, with all deliberation and compass of thought that I am master of, and am come to a very firm and most resolved determination not to quit the See of York on any account or on any consideration.... I am really poor; I am not ambitious of being rich, but have too much pride, with, I hope, a small mixture of honesty, to bear being in debt. I am now out of it, and in possession of a clear independency of that sort. I must not go back, and begin the world again at fifty-five. “The honour of Canterbury is a thing of glare and splendour, and the hopes of it a _proper incentive to schoolboys_ to industry. But I have considered all its inward parts, and examined all its duties, and if I should quit my present station to take it, I will not answer for it that in less than a twelvemonth I did not sink and die with regret and envy at the man who should succeed me here, and quit the place in my possession, as I ought to do, to one better and wiser than myself.”