. If piety
consisted in the defence of these--if it was impious to struggle for
their abrogation, I have indeed led an ungodly life.... To read,
however, his Lordship a lesson of good manners, I had prepared for him
a chastisement which would have been echoed from the _Segrave_ who
banqueteth in the castle,[129] to the idiot who spitteth over the
bridge at Gloucester."

But the Bishop had made a rather misplaced appeal for compassion, on
account of his failing eyesight; and Sydney, flinging him contemptuously on
one side, passed on to the more formidable Bishop of London.--

"I was much amused with what old Hermann says of the Bishop of
London's _AEschylus_. 'We find,' he says, '_a great arbitrariness of
proceeding, and much boldness of innovation, guided by no sure
principle_'; here it is: _qualis ab incepto_. He begins with AEschylus,
and ends with the Church of England; begins with profane, and ends
with holy innovations--scratching out old readings which every
commentator had sanctioned; abolishing ecclesiastical dignities which
every reformer had spared; thrusting an anapaeest into a verse, which
will not bear it; and intruding a Canon into a Cathedral, which does
not want it; and this is the Prelate by whom the proposed reform of
the Church has been principally planned, and to whose practical wisdom
the Legislature is called upon to defer. The Bishop of London is a man
of very great ability, humane, placable, generous, munificent; very
agreeable, but not to be trusted with great interests where calmness
and judgment are required: unfortunately, my old and amiable
school-fellow, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has melted away before
him, and sacrificed that wisdom on which we all founded our
security.... Whatever happens, I am not to blame. I have fought my
fight. Farewell"

A little later he wrote to an old friend:--

"I don't like writing to the Bishop of London: it is making a fuss,
and looks as if I regretted the part I had taken on Church Reform,
which I certainly do not--but I should be much annoyed if the Bishop
were to consider me as a perpetual grumbler against him and his
measures--I really am not: I like the Bishop and like his
conversation--the battle is ended, and I have no other quarrel with
him and the Archbishop but that they neither of them ever ask me to
dinner. You