"Dean Lefroy at a meeting of the General Diocesan Committee to make arrangements for the Church Congress at Great Yarmouth in October ... commented on the inordinate expense of founding bishoprics, and said that episcopacy in Canterbury Province cost £142,000 per annum, and in York £44,000. He believed that £2000 a year and a residence would be welcome to most bishops. The upkeep of large palaces swallowed up the bishops' incomes. Preserve the palaces, but give bishops the opportunity of living more simply. The surplus might go to poor and starving clergy." One can picture the tempered gratitude with which the Bishops, and the ladies of the Episcopal household, and the Domestic Chaplains--those "amiable young gentlemen who make themselves agreeable in the drawing-rooms of the Mitre"--must regard this obliging invitation to "live more simply." There is a good deal of human nature even in apostolic bosoms, and a man who has enjoyed an official income of £5000 a year does not as a rule regard with enthusiasm a reduction to £2000. The Bishop in "Little Dorrit," when the guests at Mr. Merdle's banquet were extolling their host's opulence, "tried to look as if he was rather poor himself"; and his successors at the present day take great pains to assure the public that they are not overpaid. The _locus classicus_ on the subject of episcopal incomes is to be found in the Rev. Hubert Handley's book called "The Fatal Opulence of Bishops," and was originally supplied by the artless candour of the present Bishop of London, who in the year 1893 published in the _Oxford House Chronicle_ a statistical statement by an unnamed Bishop. This prelate had only a beggarly income of £4200, and must therefore be the occupant of one of those comparatively cheap and humble Sees which the exigencies of the Church have lately called into being. Out of this pittance he had to pay £1950 for a removal, furniture, and repairs to the episcopal residence. This, to the lay mind, seems a good deal. Hospitality he sets down as costing £2000 a year; but somehow one feels as if one could give luncheon to the country clergy, and satisfy even the craving appetites of ordinands, at a less cost. "Stables," says the good Bishop, "are almost a necessity, and in some respects a saving;" but here the haughty disregard of details makes criticism difficult. "Robes, £100." This item is plain enough and absurd enough. The perverted ingenuity of fallen man has never devised a costume more hideous or less expressive than the episcopal "magpie"; and I am confident that Mrs. Bishop's maid could have stitched together the necessary amounts of lawn and black satin at a less cost than £100. But this exactly illustrates the plan on which these episcopal incomes are always defended by their apologists. We are told precisely what the Bishop expends on each item of charge. But we are not told, and are quite unable to divine, why each of those items should cost so much,