Mrs. Pendarves (1739) to Mrs. Granville, in reference to a friend for whom she had asked for a chaplaincy in the ducal family, "is very sorry not to be able to grant a scarf to our acquaintance. His are all filled up, and the first two that fall have been promised these four years. When I go to town, if I can make interest to get one, I will."

When private chaplainships came to be bought and sold, the office was as little exalted as the individual who held it was dignified. We find in Mrs. Carter's letters to Mrs. Montague, that the price varied from twelve to twenty guineas. A peer that had given half as much for the dedication of a play or poem, could recover his outlay, with profit, by selling a chaplainship; for peers drove this trade, in person, and pocketed the proceeds with a non olet!

These chaplainships were merely honorary, they were titular distinctions, and nothing more; but chaplains who resided with, and served in great families, invariably looked for further preferment, and were helped to it by their patrons-that is, their patrons asked some one else to help them. "My son," writes Lady Cowper (in Mrs. Delany's Autobiography and Correspondence), is to ask immediately a living of the Chancellor for Mr. Bulkeley, so situated that he may hold it with one of Lord Spenser's, of 2001. a year, in Dorsetshire, whenever it is vacant. I do not doubt my chaplain's being well provided for in time; but he is young enough to wait. The

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righteous are never forsaken." Another candidate beseeches Mrs. Delany herself "most earnestly, to get a call for him; meaning, I suppose, a living." living." And the good lady is not shocked; she simply remarks that during the time he will have to wait he will enjoy the opportunity of getting on in "French and music." While writing thus of one chaplain, she does not lose sight of another, her relative, and she whips in an intercalary postscript, among half a dozen others, at the end of a letter to Lady Andover, to the business-like effect of, "Would it be possible to obtain a prebend of Lichfield for my youngest nephew ?" Mrs. Delany was, indeed, an indefatigable applicant to right reverend prelates. "The Bishop of Lichfield,” she says in one letter, came to town last night. I shall lose no opportunity of trying my interest with him." Poor bishop!

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Easy lives, no doubt, were led by most of these chaplains of the last century, with less labour and less dissipation than used to fall to the lot of the Lord Mayor's chaplains earlier in the century, if we may trust the report of the reverend and unexemplary Mr. Pilkington, who was chaplain to that democratic Lord Mayor, Alderman Barber, the near friend of Swift, and the more intimate friend still of dashing Mrs. Manley. rakish chaplain of the Mansion-house used to excuse himself from attending his wife, on the ground that he had to be on duty with the Lord Mayor from nine in the morning to six in the evening, that he then

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went to the play, after which he always supped with Mrs. Heron, the actress, who certainly was not so good as she was good-looking.

Alderman Barber, the printer, was at all events a kindly-natured man, and did not at his own table try his chaplain's temper, as Swift would that of his curate, by giving him execrable wine, and telling him that he always kept a "poor parson" on purpose to drink it.

Philip Francis, in the fragment of autobiography inserted in his memoirs by Mr. Parkes and Mr. Merivale, introduces us to probably the last English chaplain who partly ranked, in the family in which he served, with the menials. His name was Young. He was chaplain to Lord Holland, and Francis states that he had often seen him dining with the servants. A sight to see which Francis must have peered through the windows of the steward's room. There the Reverend Mr. Young would probably have continued to dine, but that fortunately Lord Holland had an illegitimate daughter, and the family chaplain conveniently married her. The dowry of the bride was consigned to the husband in the shape of an Irish bishopric.

Those Irish bishoprics were conferred, in times gone by, on most singular principles. Cobbett concludes a character of Lord Hardwicke, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland (1801-6), by saying, "Here I should have been for ever stopped, if I had not by

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accident met with one Mr. Lindsay, a Scotch parson, since become (and I am sure it must be by Divine Providence, for it would be impossible to account for it by secondary causes) Bishop of Killaloe."

Family worship where there are not such splendid private chapels for its celebration as at Alnwick, Ashridge, and other noble houses, must necessarily be subject to unwelcome interruptions. Officiating chaplains, whether professional or for the nonce, are then "hard put to it." One of the best and latest illustrations of this circumstance is thus related by Mr. Cornwall Simeon, in his "Stray Notes on Fishing," &c. He says: "A parrot belonging to some friends of mine was generally taken out of the room when the family assembled for prayers, for fear lest he might take it into his head to join irreverently in the responses. One evening, however, his presence happened to be unnoticed and he was forgotten. For some time he maintained a decorous silence, but at length, instead of Amen! out he came with 'Cheer, boys, cheer!' On this the butler was directed to remove him, and he had got as far as the door with him, when the bird, perhaps thinking he had committed himself, and had better apologize, called out, 'Sorry I spoke !' The overpowering effect on the congregation may be more easily imagined than described."

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HEN Watson, who was subsequently Bishop of Llandaff (1782-1816), was looking for preferment, he once joyously presented himself before the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. "I am going out," said he, "as chaplain to the factory at Bencoolen !" "You are going to do nothing of the sort," replied the Master; and when Watson inquired "Why not?" his friend and superior rejoined, "Because you are by far too good a fellow to go and kill yourself by drinking punch in the Torrid Zone!" and Watson remained to confute Tom Paine, and to have his character torn to shreds, after his death, by De Quincey.

Our chaplains out of England were not such punchdrinkers as the Master of Trinity took them for. The old class of men who come under the designation of "chaplains abroad," have died out. They were peculiar men, whether resident as chaplains in garrisons or in factories. They were not missionaries, like the Roman Catholic priest who goes, we will say, to China (after due preparation), and, as soon as he