That scholarship should be remunerated was very well; that men in power should reward those who had been faithful to themselves and their children was, at any rate, very natural; that the Sovereign should occasionally have a voice in making those selections which, as head of the Church, it was popularly supposed that he always made, seemed only to be fair;--and who can say that a Minister was wrong to recompense ecclesiastical support by ecclesiastical preferment? But it must be admitted that the bench of bishops as it was constituted under the circumstances above described was not conspicuous for its clerical energy, for its theological attainments, or for its impartial use of the great church patronage which it possessed. They who sat upon it ordinarily wore their wigs with decorum and lived the lives of gentlemen; but, looking back for many years, a churchman of the Church of England cannot boast of the clerical doings of its bishops. Under the great wig system much of awe was engendered, and that amount of good was attained which consists mainly of respect and reverence for the unknown. The mere existence of a Llama is good for people who have no more clearly expressed God to worship,--and in this way the old, rich, bewigged bishops were serviceable. But, with a few exceptions, they did but little other clerical service. New churches were not built under their auspices, nor were old churches repaired. Dissent in England became strong, and the services of the State Church were in many dioceses performed with a laxity and want even of decency which, though it existed so short a time since, now hardly obtains belief. The wigs have gone, but in their places have come,--as we are bound to acknowledge,--many of those qualities, much more difficult of acquirement, which men demand when wigs will no longer satisfy them. Let any middle-aged man of the present day think of the bishops of his youth, and remember those who were known to him by report, repute, or perhaps by personal intercourse. Although bishops in those days were not common in the market-places as they are now, some of us were allowed to see them and hear them speak, and most of us may have some memory of their characters. There were the old bishops who never stirred out, and the young bishops who went to Court; and the bishop who was known to be a Crœœsus, and the bishop who had so lived that, in spite of his almost princely income, he was obliged to fly his creditors; and there was the more innocent bishop who played chess, and the bishop who still hankered after Greek plays, and the kindly old bishop who delighted to make punch in moderate proportions for young people, and a very wicked bishop or two, whose sins shall not be specially designated. Such are the bishops we remember, together with one or two of simple energetic piety. But who remembers bishops of those days who really did the work to which they were set? In how many dioceses was there a Boanerges of