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of Lambeth. With what calm and dignified contentment have some great men spoken of their situation in life, even when placed on the cold confines of poverty, and overshadowed with the darkness of solitude? We need only allude to those still more majestic spirits, who, in the midst of all afflictions—disease, penury, blindness, and old age, have nevertheless held on their appointed way, in resignation, that would not be misnamed if called happiness, and whose recorded meditations on their God have been like a continued hymn of thanksgiving. It is when we think on such things, that we see the littleness, and the hollowness, and rottenness, of mere earthly honours and riches, and feel, with a painful conviction, how weak are the titles to be held truly great, of those men who have lived so much under the influence of powers so remote from true grandeur.

That Bishop Watson's character is liable to the charge which has now been brought against it, cannot be denied; but the questions arise, to what extent may this charge be truly carried? and in his case, what are the palliating circumstances? Now, an attentive and unprejudiced reader of his memoirs will not fail to observe, that he seems to have acquired, by long indulgence, a mere habit of railing at his Majesty's ministers. There is not, in general, much bitterness in his complaints and invectives. Now and then it would seem as if his temper were ruffled, and his disposition soured. But he soon recovers his equanimity; and after giving vent to a few pompous compliments to himself, his animosity against the supposed authors of his imaginary injuries apparently subsides, and his manly mind returns to that state of honest satisfaction with itself and situation, from which it is a pity he should ever have suffered himself to be driven. Had he in reality been so dissatisfied with his lot in life, so eagerly panting after farther preferment, as frequent passages in his memoirs would lead us to believe, his general manners, deportment, and conversation, would all have borne witness to his discontent. But this, we believe, was not the case. He was a man of cheerful and gladsome habits of thinking. He had in nothing the appearance of a disappointed man. If he exhibited in his demeanour the constant consciousness of talent, and perhaps vaunted a little too much of his own endowments, there never was, we understand, about him any narrowminded injustice towards the acquirements of other men, nor yet any appearance of spite or rancour towards those who, he supposed, had overlooked his merits, or obstructed his advancement. This being the case, we are surely bound in charity to attribute the most reprehensible passages of the kind alluded to in his memoirs, in some measure to an injudicious and weak habit, that rose at first from the most delusive of all human failings, vanity and self-love,—increased by indulgence, and finally, assumed a more undisguised form during the faded strength of old age.

We must also make some allowances for him on account of the peculiar circumstances of his life. His singular success in almost every thing he attempted,—and the very general admiration which his talents excited,—his unrivalled reputation in the university,—and that homage which his powerful mind daily received from monks and striplings,—all tended to feed that intellectual pride to which by nature he was prone, till he came at last to consider himself second to no man in the kingdom, and consequently entitled to claim as his right the very highest honour with which a churchman could be crowned. There was weakness, delusion, and error, in all this. But no wonder that a man with such weaknesses, and at the same time with such strength, should conceive he possessed but little, while any thing remained to be acquired,—that he should observe, with undue indignation, the elevation of men over his head, whom he considered so much his inferiors; and who, in good truth, often were so, in as far as talents were concerned,—that, in short, he should find it impossible to account for his remaining all his days the Bishop of Landaff only, except from the ignorance of those who might have promoted him to richer Sees. Had he been a man of mere ordinary merit, all this would have been truly ludicrous. But he had great abilities; and though we think that there were things about him that justified king and ministers in keeping him where he was, it is not to be expected that he could have entered into, or distinctly under-