In 1803, eight years after the Bishop’s first Building Act was obtained, the assessment of Paddington was £9,966 10_s._ and the first poor-rate, levied under this assessment, was one shilling and three-pence in the pound. This valuation, however, was only one-third of the rental of 272 tenements; the smaller tenements not having been rated at all. The overseers’ account, this year, amounted to £701 16_s._ 7_d._; and it increased annually till 1811, when it was reported to the ratepayers at large, at their annual meeting on Easter Tuesday, that the expenses of supporting the poor have increased fourfold, in the last sixteen years. No wonder, then, that the sensible inhabitants of Paddington, who saw what the Bishop’s Building Acts were doing for the bishop and his lessees, and who felt, in a very tender point, what they were doing for themselves as ratepayers, should be anxious that those, who derived so much benefit from the parish, should bear some share in the increased expenses. But although all the expenses of the church and the poor had been so considerately transferred from the owners of the Paddington Estate, to the pockets of the rate-payers; and although the additional claim of the poor was excessive, yet it was not till the twenty-seventh of October, 1807, that the rate-payers in vestry assembled, “resolved that the Lord Bishop, in respect of the great tithes is rateable, and that he be rated accordingly.” One would have thought that the bishop, and his lessees, knowing all this—knowing that the “expenses of supporting the poor, had increased fourfold in the last sixteen years (that is, since the Act of 1795, during which time their income from the land had increased, perhaps in a like proportion) and that the same has arisen, in a great measure, from the necessity of constant and casual relief to paupers residing in small tenements built upon the Bishop of London’s Estate;” knowing that they had received £2,263 7_s._ 6_d._, for land to increase the burial ground,—a purchase made necessary principally on account of this great increase in the number of paupers, and the conditions under which they were placed: Knowing, I say, all these things; for to not one could they have pleaded ignorance, it is barely believeable that these legal protectors of the church and of the poor should have refused this legal demand. Yet most certainly they did so; and further, put the parishioners to the unpleasant necessity of applying to a barrister, learned in the law, for his opinion on this point. By the vestry minutes, dated November 3rd, 1810, we find that Mr. Const, “_apprehends_ the Lord Bishop _is_ liable to the poor-rate for the tithes both of the lands, belonging to the See, in occupation of other persons, and those for which a composition is received.” And accordingly in January, 1811, the Bishop of London is rated in the new assessment made that year, upon £462, the estimated annual value of the great tithes.