He wrote as quickly as he read. When once he had amassed the necessary facts, he sate down amid all the distracting sights and sounds of a drawing-room crowded with femininity, and wrote at full speed, without deliberations, embellishments, or erasures; only betraying by the movements of his expressive face his amusement and interest "as fresh images came clustering round his pen." As soon as the essay was finished, he would throw it on the table, saying to his wife, "There, Kate, just look it over—dot the i's and cross the t's;" and went out for his walk. It should be added that his writing was singularly difficult to read, that he was very infirm about spelling proper names, and that he was exceptionally careless in correcting his proofs.

Of those essays which he subsequently reprinted, as judging them most worthy of preservation, I see that by 1821 he had written fifty. Among these were such masterpieces of humour and argument as "Edgeworth on Bulls," "Methodism," "Indian Missions," "Hannah More," "Public Schools," "America," "Game-Laws" and "Botany Bay." On the 19th of May 1820, he wrote, "I found in London both my articles very popular—upon the Poor-Laws and America. The passage on Taxation had great success."[76] Some of these papers will be considered separately, when we come to discuss his style and his opinions; but space must here be found for an unrivalled specimen of his controversial method, which belongs to the year 1822. It is called "Persecuting Bishops." "Is Bishops in that title a nominative or an accusative?" grimly inquired a living prelate, when the present writer was extolling the essay so named. It is a nominative; and perhaps the exacter title would have been "A Persecuting Bishop."

Herbert Marsh[77] was Second Wrangler in 1779, Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, Margaret Professor of Divinity, Bishop of Llandaff from 1816 to 1819, and of Peterborough from 1819 till his death. He was a "High Churchman of the old school"—perhaps the most unpleasant type of theologian in Christendom. We know, from the Life of Father "Ignatius" Spencer,[78] that Bishop Marsh played whist with his candidates for Orders on the eve of the ordination, and all that we read about him beautifully illustrates that tone of "quiet worldliness" which Dean Church described as the characteristic of the English clergy in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. But what he lacked in personal devotion he made up (as some have done since his day) by furious hostility to spiritual and religious enthusiasm in others. He opposed the civil claims alike of Roman Catholics and of Dissenters. He attacked the Bible Society. He denounced Charles Simeon. He insulted Isaac Milner; and he determined to purge his diocese of Evangelicalism (which, oddly enough, he seems to have identified with Calvinism). His manly resolve to stifle religious earnestness culminated in the year 1820, when he drew up a set of eighty-seven questions, which he proposed to every candidate for Orders, and to every clergyman who sought his license to officiate. Failure to answer these questions to the Bishop's satisfaction was to be punished by exclusion from the diocese of Peterborough. Happily, the Evangelical clergy of that period was very little disposed to sit down under Episcopal tyranny. The Bishop's set of questions was met by a hailstorm of pamphlets. Petitions for redress were poured into the House of Lords. The Bishop was forced into the open, and constrained to make the best defence he could in a published speech. In November 1822, Sydney Smith, in the Edinburgh Review, came to the assistance of his brother-clergy against the high-handed tyranny of the Persecuting Bishop.

The reviewer begins by giving the Bishop credit for good intentions; but maintains that his conduct has been—

"singularly injudicious, extremely harsh, and in its effects (though not in its intentions) very oppressive and vexatious to the clergy…. We cannot believe that we are doing wrong in ranging ourselves on the weaker side, in the cause of propriety and justice. The Mitre protects its wearer from indignity; but it does not secure impunity."

After this preface Sydney Smith goes on to develop his argument against the Bishop, and he starts with the highly reasonable proposition that a man is presumably wrong when all his friends, whose habits and interests would naturally lead them to side with him, think him wrong.—

"If a man were to indulge in taking medicine till the apothecary, the druggist, and the physician all called upon him to abandon his philocathartic propensities—if he were to gratify his convivial habits till the landlord demurred and the waiter shook his head—we should naturally imagine that advice so disinterested was not given before it was wanted."

The Bishop of Peterborough has all his brother-bishops against him, though they certainly love power as well as he. Not one will defend him in debate; not one will allege that he has acted or would act as Peterborough has acted.

Then, again, the bishop who refuses to license a curate unless he satisfactorily answers Eighty-Seven Questions, thereby puts himself in opposition to the bishop who ordained the curate. One standard of orthodoxy is established in one diocese; another in another. The theological system of the Church becomes local and arbitrary instead of national and fixed.—

"If a man is a captain in the army in one part of England, he is a captain in all. The general who commands north of the Tweed does not say, 'You shall never appear in my district, or exercise the functions of an officer, if you do not answer eighty-seven questions on the art of war, according to my notions.' The same officer who commands a ship of the line in the Mediterranean is considered as equal to the same office in the North Seas. The Sixth Commandment is suspended by one medical diploma from the North of England to the South.[79] But, by the new system of interrogation, a man may be admitted into Orders at Barnet, rejected at Stevenage, readmitted at Buckden, kicked out as a Calvinist at Witham Common, and hailed as an ardent Arminian on his arrival at York."