The death of Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, excites a few touches of Walpole's sarcastic pen. He says, "that his early life had shown his versatility, his latter his ambition. But hypocrisy not being parts, he rose in the church without ever making a figure in the state." So much for antithesis. There is no reason why a clergyman should make a figure in the state under any circumstances; and the less figure he made in the state, as it was then constituted, the more likely he was to be fitted for the church. But the true censure on Secker would have been, that he rose, without making a figure in any thing; that he had never produced any work worthy of notice as a divine; that he had neither eloquence in the pulpit, nor vigour with the pen; that he seems to have been at all times a man of extreme mediocrity; that his qualifications with the ministry were, his being a neutral on all the great questions of the day; and his merits with posterity were, that he possessed power without giving offence. A hundred such men might have held the highest positions of the church, without producing the slightest effect on the public mind; or might have been left in the lowest, without being entitled to accuse the injustice of fortune. His successor was Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield, raised to the primacy by the Duke of Grafton, who, as Walpole says, "had a friendship for the bishop's nephew, Earl Cornwallis." This seems not altogether the most sufficient reason for placing a man at the head of the Church of England, but we must take the reason such as we find it. Walpole adds, that the nomination had, however, the merit of disappointing a more unsuitable candidate, Ternet of London, whom he describes as "the most time-serving of the clergy, and sorely chagrined at missing the archiepiscopal mitre."