A time-honoured, gentleman-like, English, picturesque arrangement
is so far very delightful. But are there not other attributes very
desirable--nay, absolutely necessary--in respect to which this
time-honoured, picturesque arrangement is so very deficient?
How pleasant it was, too, that one bishop should be getting fifteen
thousand a year, and another with an equal cure of parsons only four!
That a certain prelate could get twenty thousand one year and his
successor in the same diocese only five the next! There was something
in it pleasant, and picturesque; it was an arrangement endowed with
feudal charms, and the change which they have made was distasteful to
many of us. A bishop with a regular salary, and no appanage of land
and land-bailiffs, is only half a bishop. Let any man prove to me the
contrary ever so thoroughly--let me prove it to my own self ever so
often--my heart in this matter is not thereby a whit altered. One
liked to know that there was a dean or two who got his three thousand
a year, and that old Dr. Purple held four stalls, one of which was
golden, and the other three silver-gilt! Such knowledge was always
pleasant to me! A golden stall! How sweet is the sound thereof to
church-loving ears! But bishops have been shorn of their beauty, and
deans are in their decadence.
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