_De_ vivis _nil nisi bonum_. The predecessor of the present Metropolitan of Serajevo, amongst his other accomplishments, was an habitual drunkard. He lived in Sardanapalian luxury—his table groaned with plate; and at his death he left untold treasures in costly furs alone—the fleecings of his flock! His rapacity was such that even the slavish spirit of the Bosnian rayah was provoked to resistance, and in 1864 the agitation became so dangerous that an assembly of the notables was called at Serajevo to devise a remedy; and a certain standard of ecclesiastical dues not to be transgressed was finally imposed on the bishops by the Turkish authorities themselves. But the Metropolitan, with the shrewdness of his race, read between the lines. All that was meant, as he had the good sense to perceive, was a slight increase of his expenditure under the head of _lubrication_. Thoemmel, writing so soon after these events as 1867, mentions that ‘this standard has already become a dead letter.’ It is no secret that one of the main provocations of the revolt in the Herzegovina was the tyranny of the Turkophile bishop Prokopios. When the storm burst, one of the first attempts at pacification was the translation of this ghostly vampire to a fatter see! Vain indeed must be the efforts of the rayah flock to save themselves from the wolves while they have a hireling for their shepherd! These episcopal sycophants of the infidel serve the Turk in a hundred ways—they screen a hundred abuses. No sooner does an awkward revelation see the light, than one of these renegade prelates steps forward to throw dust in the eyes of the Christian West. They know well that to a certain class of mind there is something comfortable in the very name of bishop. They trade upon the saintly spell which throws a halo of veracity round any lies they may invent to shield their patrons or themselves. Ill-founded, indeed, seem the complaints of the rayah when his bishop comes forward to confess, from a Christian love of truth and justice—but with how much laudable reluctance!—that the wrongs of his too blatant flock are purely imaginary, and that, if anyone has been aggrieved, it is the honest, the moral, the merciful, the tolerant, Osmanlì![256]