could not listen to a hasty, ill-considered, remark without taking it to pieces, and demonstrating, by successive questions, put in a slow, deliberate tone of voice, the fallacy of the separate parts of the proposition, and, by consequence, of the whole. Hence he was feared and respected rather than beloved; and those who ought to have been proud of having such a man among them wreaked their small spite against him by accusing him of being inhospitable, of walking out attended by a dog trained to know and bite a curate, and the like. These slanders, of which we hope he was unconscious, he could not answer; those who attacked him in public he could and did crush with an accuracy of exposition, and a power of sarcasm, for which it would be hard to find a parallel. We need only refer to his answers to Sir Benjamin Hall, M.P. for Marylebone, on the general question of the condition of the churches in his diocese, appended to his charge for 1851, and on the special case of the Collegiate Church of Brecon, in two letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury; or to the _Letter to the Rev. Rowland Williams_, published in 1860. Mr Williams had published some sermons, entitled _Rational Godliness_, the supposed heterodoxy of which had alarmed the clergy of his diocese, seventy of whom had signed a memorial to the Bishop, praying him to take some notice of the book; in other words, to remove the author from the college at Lampeter, of which he was vice-principal. The Bishop had declined to interfere, and in his charge of 1857 had discussed the question at length, considering it, as was his manner, from all points of view, and, while he found much to blame, defending the author’s intentions, on the ground of the high opinion of his personal character which he himself held. This, however, did not satisfy Mr Williams. We cannot help suspecting that he was longing for a martyr’s crown; and, indignant at not having obtained one, he addressed the Bishop at great length in what he called _An Earnestly Respectful Letter on the Difficulty of bringing Theological Questions to an Issue_. He described the charge as ‘a miracle of cleverness,’ but deplored its indefiniteness; he drew a picture of ‘a preacher in our wild mountains’ who came to seek counsel from his bishop and got only evasive answers—‘in all helps for our guidance Abergwili may equal Delphi in wisdom, but also in ambiguity[70]’—and entreated the Bishop to declare plainly his own opinion on the questions raised. For once Bishop Thirlwall’s serenity was fairly ruffled. Stung by the ingratitude of a man whom he had steadily befriended, and whose aim was, as he thought, to draw him into admissions damaging to himself, he struck with all his might and main, and, as was said at the time, ‘you may hear every bone in his adversary’s body cracking.’ One specimen of the remarkable power of his reply must suffice. On the comparison of himself to the Delphic oracle he remarked: