rote respecting Hervey, in one of his own
moods of almost fiendish malignity, I fear are true. I am frightened as I
look back into the past, and fancy I behold that ghastly, beautiful face;
as I think of the queen writhing on her death-bed, and crying out,
"Pray!--pray!"--of the royal old sinner by her side, who kisses her dead
lips with frantic grief, and leaves her to sin more;--of the bevy of
courtly clergymen, and the archbishop, whose prayers she rejects, and who
are obliged for propriety's sake to shuffle off the anxious inquiries of
the public, and vow that her Majesty quitted this life "in a heavenly
frame of mind". What a life!--to what ends devoted! What a vanity of
vanities! It is a theme for another pulpit than the lecturer's. For a
pulpit?--I think the part which pulpits play in the deaths of kings is the
most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the blinking of
disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the
falsehood and sycophancies--all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State
churches: these monstrous threnodies have been sung from time immemorial
over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson
must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical
black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the clergyman must flatter
him--announce his piety whilst living, and when dead, perform the obsequies
of "our most religious and gracious king".

I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious king's
favourite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5,000_l._ (She betted him
5,000_l._ that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.)
Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?
As I peep into George II's St. James's, I see crowds of cassocks rustling
up the back-stairs of the ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping
purses into their laps; that godless old king yawning under his canopy in
his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing. Discoursing
about what?--about righteousness and judgement? Whilst the chaplain is
preaching, the king is chattering in German almost as loud as the
preacher; so loud that the clergyman--it may be one Dr. Young, he who wrote
_Night Thoughts_, and discoursed on the splendours of the stars, the
glories of heaven, and utter vanities of this world--actually burst out
crying in his pulpit because the Defender of the Faith and dispenser of
bishoprics would