Amid the cares inseparable from the active supervision of an important diocese, he never forgot his old parish of Alderley, and his attachment for the scene of his early labours continued unshaken. "It would be vain and useless," he said, on commencing his primary visitation, "to speak to others of what none could feel so deeply as myself. What it cost me to leave Alderley, it is for myself alone to feel." On parting with his parishioners he had given a sacred pledge that he would visit them every year, and the annual recurrence of the time when he could again make the familiar round of visits to those he had known and loved during his long ministerial intercourse, and who themselves looked forward to his coming as the greatest pleasure of their lives, was anticipated with fond delight. "I have been," he wrote to a friend, a few months before his death, "in various directions over the parish, visiting many welcome faces, laughing with the living, weeping over the dying. It is gratifying to see the cordial familiarity with which they receive me; and Norwich clergy would scarcely know me sitting by cottage firesides, talking over old times, with their hands clasped in mine, as an old and dear friend." On the last day of December, 1848, the eve of his seventieth birthday, he wrote in his Journal:-- In a few hours I shall have attained the threescore years and ten and closed the eleventh year of my episcopal life ... and though these latter years have been accompanied with much labour and pain and sorrow, more and more alive as I am to the difficulties presenting themselves, still I feel satisfaction in what I have been instrumental in doing. How many parishes have been supplied with resident clergy, in which no pastoral care had been for years manifested? How many churches have had the full measure of services prescribed, in which from time immemorial the most scanty administration had sufficed? And how many schools have been established for the benefit of the thousands who had been, with the most culpable negligence, permitted to remain brutalised and uncivilised and perishing for lack of knowledge?