[56] Spencer Perceval had recently taken a villa on Hampstead Heath, for
the benefit of his wife's health.
[57] Spencer Perceval's elder brother, Charles George Perceval (1756-1840),
was created Lord Arden in 1802.
[58] John Archibald Murray (1779-1859), a Judge of the Court of Session.
[59] In October 1844 Eugene Robin, reviewing Sydney Smith in the _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, wrote as follows:--"Cache sous le pseudonyme de
Peter Plymley il adresse ces nouvelles _provinciales_ a un
reverend pasteur, qui est bien le parfait modele de la sottise
protestante, la quintessence des docteurs Bowles et des archidiacres
Nares."
CHAPTER IV
FOSTON--"PERSECUTING BISHOPS"--BENCH AND BAR
At the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
the most serious evil which beset the Church of England was the system of
Pluralities and Non-Residence. A prosperous clergyman might hold
half-a-dozen separate preferments, and, as long as he paid curates to
perform the irreducible minimum of public duty, he need never show his face
inside his deserted parishes. The ecclesiastical literature of the time
abounds in quaint illustrations of the equanimity with which this system,
and all its attendant evils, was regarded even by respectable and
conscientious men. Thomas Newton, the commentator on Prophecy, was Dean of
St.
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