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Edinburgh, March 6th.

We have seen how Richard Watson outshone all his contemporaries in the scientific studies of academical retirement,—how his talents, his virtues, and his zeal, raised him to the highest honours in the noble university which he adorned, and that in the early prime of manhood he stood a conspicuous object in the eyes of his country. His lot in life may well be called fortunate. For how many men, his equals perhaps in talents, and his superiors in erudition and genius, have pined away their lives in unpatronized and unbeneficed obscurity. No unlucky or disheartening incident ever seems to have befallen him,—his strong sense saw and seized every honourable mean of advancement,—he sailed boldly and skilfully along the stream of preferment, without ever having touched on a single shoal,—and a favourable and steady wind blew till he reached his destination—the bench. We say this with no intention of undervaluing his character. But, sometimes in after life, the good Bishop seems rather to have forgotten how singularly prosperous had been his career. After discharging for years the duties of several active and lucrative offices, and enjoying the emoluments of several wealthy sinecures, we find him, at the early age of forty-five, at the very summit of his profession, and clothed with what he considered the highest of earthly distinctions—the gorgeous robes of prelacy. They who think that there is a tide in human affairs "which, taken at the full, leads on to fortune," may probably attribute his success to the lucky hour in which he set sail. But if this would be unfair, there at least can be nothing wrong in saying, that few men have had more cause to be grateful to Providence for their temporal prosperity, than the late Bishop of Landaff; and that, instead of representing himself as a neglected and ill-used man, it would have been far more rational, manly, and Christian-like, to have cherished a deep and devout sence of the singularly happy destiny which God had bestowed on him, and to have forgotten entirely any real of imagined injustice of his fellow-men, in boundless and overwhelming gratitude to the Giver of all mercies.

We feel ourselves called upon to speak our sentiments on this subject boldly and without equivocation. There is a piety—pure, lofty, and sublime—which guards the spirit against the forcible intrusion of worldly thoughts. The person who is thus pious performs the duties imposed upon him, by the necessities of this life, with unshrinking fidelity. But is it possible that such a person shall deliver himself up so slavishly to mere worldly concerns, as to become dependent for his happiness on the caprices of fortune? Even in a philosophical light such conduct is truly pitiable—in a religious light we hesitate to give it a name. It is most painful to hear a Christian divine, loaded with wealth and honours, deploring his ill-fortune in life, and seemingly haunted by anger and ill-will towards men, whom, if they had used him injuriously, he ought to have forgiven; and whom, at all events, a great mind ought not thus to have condescended to consider as the arbiters of its destiny,—the good or evil spirits which could sway at pleasure its feelings, opinions, and passions, and give, as it were, a colour to its whole character.

What if the Bishop of Landaff had met in early life a man superior to himself, and had been overcome in the contest for academical honours and offices? What if he had never been a bishop at all? If his services in the cause of religion, important as they were, had been rewarded with a comfortable living of £500 a year? Such a lot would, to many a good, wise, learned theologian, have appeared the very summit of earthly felicity. Richard Watson really seems often to have forgotten every body in the whole world, except the bench of bishops and himself. The many hundreds of learned men doomed for ever to continue far below him in wealth and dignity, he seldom thought of at all, while his inward eye dwelt on the palace of Durham or