260 Anecdotes and Conversations. [SEPT. 



their good woman without a head," a piece of humour in which, by-the- 

 by, he rarely indulged before the ladies so great was his sense of pro- 

 priety. 



About the lime when Sir Samuel Romilly was endeavouring to overturn 

 our judicial institutions, the archdeacon was called on to preach the Assize 

 sermon before the judges. In this sermon he laid it down that, as Christia- 

 nity was part of the law of the land, it followed that the law of the land 

 could not be contradictory to Christianity ; and that, consequently, to alter 

 the law was as bad as to alter the gospel. He cited the example of the 

 French revolution, in which the law and religion had perished together ; 

 and praising the wisdom of the Medes and Persians, thenco took occasion 

 to eulogize the existing government, whose hostility to all amelioration was 

 truly Asiatic. For this sermon, which he printed with the motto of " stare 

 super vias antiquas," he was so unmercifully handled by the opposition 

 press, that, as he once told me with great glee, he was not without hopes 

 of being kicked into the prelacy. Whether this promotion was in reality 

 intended, it is now hard to say, for death deprived the parish of Braintown 

 Parva of its ornament, and the world of a luminary, somewhat suddenly, 

 just as the archdeacon put the finishing hand to his treatise, " de inutili- 

 tatis prastantid in disciplinis academicis," in which he ably vindicated 



the British universities, and proved by the equation of a+b v x=0, that 

 the whole genius and talent of the country gentlemen, as exhibited in both 

 Houses of Parliament, which were the efficient causes of the unparalleled 

 greatness of England, were exclusively owing to a discipline that palpably 

 refuted the maxim of " non ex quovis ligno." The king, he justly 

 observed, could make a peer of whom he pleased : but Oxford or Cam- 

 bridge could alone form the truly aristocratic mind, and level genius to the 

 senatorial calibre. Thus did this truly great man die as he had lived, the 

 steady and able advocate of the wisdom of our ancestors the studious cul- 

 tivator of all those inapplicable sciences, which, by keeping the human 

 mind aloof from the realities of life, preserve mankind in innocence, docility, 

 and obedience to the powers that be and the able opponent of that ignis 

 fatuus illumination, which, under the modest designation of innovation, is 

 in reality, and to the whole extent in which it is conceded, nothing more 

 nor less than revolution. In the evil days upon which we have fallen, the 

 example of such a life cannot be without its use. Would to heaven that 

 the Rev. S. S., and many others who are looked up to in the church as 

 " wits and philosophers," and who openly profess a latitudinarian liberality, 

 would profit in time by the instruction it affords, and step forward man- 

 fully to fight the good fight, while it is yet time, in the ranks of the ex- 

 ministers, against the two great evils of the age, Popery and George 

 Canning. T. 



