The Hampden war has been turning greatly to the advantage of the Doctor; his enemies have exposed themselves in the most flagrant manner, and Archdeacon Hare has written a very able pamphlet also exposing the rascality (for that is the proper word) of his accusers, and affording his own valuable testimony to Hampden's orthodoxy; above all things, Sly Sam of Oxford (my would-be director and confessor) has covered himself with ridicule and disgrace. The disgrace is the greater because everybody sees through his motives: he has got into a scrape at Court and is trying to scramble out of it; there, however, he is found out, and his favour seems to have long been waning. The Duke of Bedford tells me the Queen and Prince are in a state of hot zeal in this matter. The Prince writes to Lord John every day, and urges him to prosecute Dean Merewether, which of course Lord John is too wise to do. That Dean is a very paltry fellow, and has moved heaven and earth to get made a bishop himself; besides memorialising the Queen, he wrote to Lord Lansdowne and suggested to him to put an end to the controversy by making him a bishop now, and Hampden at the next vacancy. The whole proceeding reflects great discredit on the great mass of clergymen who have joined in the clamour against Hampden, and on the Oxonian majority who condemned him, for it is now pretty clear that very few, if any, of them had ever read his writings. Now that they are set forth, and people see his unintelligible jargon about dogmas themselves unintelligible, there must be some dispassionate men who will be disgusted and provoked with the whole thing, and at the ferocity with which these holy disputants assault and vituperate each other about that which none of them understand, and which it is a mere mockery and delusion to say that any of them really believe; it is cant, hypocrisy, and fanaticism from beginning to end. There is that old fawning sinner, the Bishop of Exeter; it appears that a dozen years ago he called on Hampden at Oxford to express to him the pleasure with which he had read his Bampton Lectures, and to compliment him on them. The Archbishop of Dublin was present on this occasion.