An ingenious clergyman who shared Dean Lefroy's and Mr. Handley's views on episcopal incomes, and had an inconvenient love of statistics, made a study at the Probate Office of the personalty left by English Bishops who died between 1855 and 1885. The average was £54,000, and the total personalty something more than two millions sterling. "This was exclusive of any real estate they may have possessed, and exclusive of any sums invested in policies of life-assurance or otherwise settled for the benefit of their families." Myself no lover of statistics or of the extraordinarily ill-ventilated Will-room at Somerset House, I am unable to say how far the episcopal accumulations of the last twenty years may have affected the total and the average. It is only fair to remember that several of the Bishops who died between 1855 and 1885 dated from the happy days before the Ecclesiastical Commission curtailed episcopal incomes, and may have had ten, or fifteen, or twenty thousand a year. On the other hand, it is to be borne in mind that, since Sir William Harcourt's Budget, the habit of "dodging the death-duties" has enormously increased, and has made it difficult to know what a testator, episcopal or other, really possessed. But it is scarcely possible to doubt that, if the public were permitted to examine all the episcopal pass-books, we should find that, in spite of the exactions of upholsterers and furniture-removers, butchers and bakers, robe-makers and horse-dealers, the pecuniary lot of an English Bishop is, to borrow a phrase of Miss Edgeworth's, "vastly put-up-able with." Just after Mr. Bright had been admitted to the Cabinet, and when the more timid and more plausible members of his party hoped that he would begin to curb his adventurous tongue, he attended a banquet of the Fishmongers' Company at which the Archbishops and Bishops were entertained. The Archbishop of York (Dr. Thomson) said in an after-dinner speech that the Bishops were the most liberal element in the House of Lords, seeing that they were the only peers created for life. This statement Mr. Bright, speaking later in the evening, characterized as an excess of hilarity; "though," he added, "it is possible that, with a Bishop's income, I might have been as merry as any of them, with an inexhaustible source of rejoicing in the generosity, if not in the credulity, of my countrymen." To this outrageous sally the assembled prelates could, of course, only reply by looking as dignified (and as poor) as they could; and no doubt the general opinion of the Episcopal Bench is that they are an overworked and ill-remunerated set of men.