Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishopric of fair Dunkeld.”
[10] Yes, dear lady; see, therefore, the next article. [↑]
[11] Yes, my dear, shares down; and—it is some poor comfort for you and me to know that. For as I correct this sheet for press, I hear from the proprietor of the chief slate quarry in the neighbourhood, that the poor idiots of shareholders have been beguiled into tunnelling four miles under Welsh hills—to carry slates! and even those from the chief quarry in question, they cannot carry, for the proprietors are under contract to send them by an existing line. [↑]
[12] Will any charitable Christian tell me who the owners are?—in the meantime, “confusion on their banners wait.” [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA
LETTER LXII.
There were more, and more harmful misprints in last ‘Fors’ than usual, owing to my having driven my printers to despair, after they had made all the haste they could, by late dubitation concerning the relative ages of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, which forced me to cut out a sentence about them, and displace corrected type. But I must submit to all and sundry such chances of error, for, to prevent them, would involve a complete final reading of the whole, with one’s eye and mind on the look-out for letters and stops all along, for which I rarely allow myself time, and which, had I a month to spare, would yet be a piece of work ill spent, in merely catching three t’s instead of two in a “[lettter].” The name of the Welsh valley is wrong, too; but I won’t venture on correction of that, which I feel to be hopeless; the reader must, however, be kind enough to transfer the ‘and,’ now the sixth word in the upper line of the [[42]]note at page 38, and make it the fourth word, instead; to put a note of interrogation at the end of clause in the fourth line of page 35, and to insert an s, changing ‘death’ into ‘deaths’ in the third line of page 27;—the death in Sheffield being that commended to the Episcopic attention of York, and that in London to the Episcopic attention of London.
And this commendation, the reader will I hope perceive to be made in sequel to much former talk concerning Bishops, Soldiers, Lawyers, and Squires;—which, perhaps, he imagined me to have spoken jestingly; or it may be, in witlessness; or it may be, in voluble incipient insanity. Admitting myself in no small degree open to such suspicion, I am now about to re-word some matters which madness would gambol from; and I beg the reader to observe that any former gambolling on my part, awkward or untimely as it may have seemed, has been quite as serious, and intentionally progressive, as Morgiana’s dance round the captain of the Forty Thieves.
If, then, the reader will look at the analysis of Episcopacy in ‘Sesame and Lilies,’ the first volume of all my works; next at the chapter on Episcopacy in ‘Time and Tide;’ and lastly, refer to what he can gather in the past series of ‘Fors,’ he will find the united gist of all to be, that Bishops cannot take, much less give, account of men’s souls unless they first take and give account of their bodies: and that, [[43]]therefore, all existing poverty and crime in their dioceses, discoverable by human observation, must be, when they are Bishops indeed, clearly known to, and describable by them, or their subordinates. Of whom the number, and discipline in St. George’s Company, if by God’s grace it ever take the form I intend, will be founded on the institution of the same by the first Bishop, or more correctly Archbishop, whom the Christian church professes to obey. For what can possibly be the use of printing the Ten Commandments which he delivered, in gold,—framing them above the cathedral altar,—pronouncing them in a prelatically sonorous voice,—and arranging the responsive supplications of the audience to the tune of an organ of the best manufacture, if the commanding Bishops institute no inquiry whatever into the physical power of—say this starving shoemaker in Seven Dials,—to obey such a command as ‘thou shalt not covet’ in the article of meat; or of his son to honour in any available measure either the father or mother, of whom the one has departed to seek her separate living, and the other is lying dead with his head in the fireplace.