the large burial ground round that church was provided for the parish when the edifice was consecrated. Considerable restoration and embellishments have been also recently effected both at the Parish Church and at Christ Church, and a transept added to Trinity Church. So much for the material building up of the Church in this "neglected and misused parish" during the incumbency of the late Vicar.

Neither have directly spiritual and charitable plans for the better ordering of the parish been overlooked by the Church. At the head of these we must place the separation from the parish church of the two ecclesiastical districts which, in 1844, were attached to the two new churches before-mentioned. By this arrangement the incumbents of those churches voluntarily, and without any benefit or emolument to themselves, relieved the mother church of the spiritual charge of seven out of her twelve thousand parishioners. We have to acknowledge, however, that a very considerable amount of this population is not virtually under the ministrations of the church, being joined to dissenting communions. In the year 1832, a District Visiting Society, with visitors male and female, under the direction of the Clergy, was instituted, which for twenty years has been relieving the wants, and sympathizing with the sorrows of the numerous poor. A Literary Society has also been established which, though purely of a secular character, would appear to repudiate that charge of neglect laid upon the overseers of the parish, as it possesses a considerable museum and library, and for eight or nine years has been able to provide a weekly lecture to a numerous audience during the winter half of the year; and has tended to increase harmony and good will among all ranks and denominations-a blessing now so rudely interrupted! We may further remark that when the late Vicar came to the living, he found that its duties had been discharged by his predecessor and one Curate; and, during his own incumbency, this number gradually increased, though the population of the town did not much augment, till at his decease it amounted to seven regularly officiating Clergy, five of whom protested against Mr. Bennett's appointment. The public

means of grace in connexion with our Church, increased, as may be concluded, in an equal ratio with the opportunity of affording them-thus the four full services which were performed weekly in the parish when the late Vicar was appointed, had increased to the number of fourteen several years before his death.

After this statement of facts, your Lordship can form an opinion of the justice of Mr. Bennett's remark on the "neglect and misuse to which Frome has been subject for so many years;" but perhaps the most striking refutation to this charge may be found in the determined opposition which has been offered to his introduction among us-the difference between truth and error, and the blessings of spiritual religion, are too fully understood and too deeply appreciated among the most intelligent of the parishioners, to allow their submitting themselves to the spiritual guidance of a pastor in whom they can place no confidence.

Mixed up with the larger portion of Mr. Bennett's letter, wherein he confesses the truth of the charges brought against him respecting his practices abroad, and attempts to defend and justify them, are certain statements and allusions on which I must animadvert, before I turn to his sophistical reasonings on the main point.

STATEMENT OF THE EAVES-DROPPER.

The first statement to which I must allude is a most unworthy personal attack on a gentleman who has been dragged into the controversy without his concurrence, and in the first place even without his knowledge. Let us turn, my Lord, to Mr. Bennett's mild and christian strictures on this gentleman's conduct: "There are the observations of waiters at a German hotel; there is the talk of some English travellers sojourning in a strange place; above all, there is the evidence of the anonymous eaves-dropper listening at key-holes, and applying his ears to ventriloquial walls.' We are told that this' Gentleman' is a Professor' in some place of education near London; but his name is not given by Mr. Horsman,

6

so far fortunately. What this Professor' heard through the ventriloquial wall,' we are not told. He only gives the court his inference drawn from what he heard,—not the very things he heard" (pp. 13, 14). Mr. Bennett adverts again at p. 66, to the same subject; "And when we find the House of Commons condescending to listen to a speech which detailed scandal picked up by German waiters, and resting on the hearsay evidence of an eaves-dropper, our regret at the total loss of gentlemanly feeling, as generally maintained in society, can hardly be expressed."

The language is so graphic here" the anonymous eavesdropper listening at key-holes and applying his ears to ventriloquial walls,”—that it makes us suppose the writer's mind must have been vividly impressed with the beautiful statue of the listening slave which he had lately seen at Rome he appears to picture to his mind's eye the weapon which the crouching figure is holding in his hand, apparently with the purpose of sharpening it, preparatory to his giving him "the stab of the assassin in the dark.' 99*

The opinion formed of a public informer, like that of a spy who is rewarded in one camp, and hung in the other, will differ accordingly as the mind is affected with the nature of his evidence. Even the office of a spy has the sanction of Holy Writ, as we know from the history of the twelve men who were sent "to spy out the land of Canaan," and his office, when exercised in a good cause, has not been considered disreputable under the code of either ancient or modern honor. Thus the Roman Consul who could cendemn with an unchanged countenance his sons to death for plotting against the commonwealth, rewarded the slave who had revealed their conspiracy-the subject perhaps of the marble which appears impressed on Mr. Bennett's imagination-with money, liberty, and citizenship.†

In the Peninsular campaign our success was often to be attributed to the accurate information obtained, by such means, of the position and the strength of the enemy; and we require no more striking instance of the great and good *See p. 13 of Second Letter. + Livy, lib. 2, cap. 5.

results of such an enterprise than we are reminded of by the sight of the Danish camp near Bratton, visible from our own parish, in which our great Saxon king, acting as a spy, obtained that information which enabled him to drive the heathen plunderers from our island, and to re-establish Christianity and peace among its inhabitants.

"the

So much for the slur endeavoured to be cast on spies" who, Mr. Bennett says, were watching for him at the Roman mass at Kissingen. That such "espionage" was practised upon him is, I believe, the idea of an overheated imagination; at all events it does not appear that the gentleman in question sent any such spies to watch Mr. Bennett's movements, and therefore the full measure of his share of blame must rest upon his being an informer.

and

Had the massacre of St. Bartholomew been revealed to the Protestants on the eve of the memorable 24th of August, will Mr. Bennett say that the informer would not have achieved an action honorable in the estimation of men and pleasing in the sight of God? Pope Gregory the Thirteenth would not have thought so, for he struck a medal to commemorate the event; but I trust that Mr. Bennett, though he puts the good Coligni and all the rest who fell on that horrible night, without the pale of the church, is of a different mind. But the fact is, if there were the spirit of a Hamlet in the case, there was certainly no rat behind the arras, for this gentleman whose evidence has stirred up so much choler, whose name, by the way, appears to my eyes in very legible characters, in the debate of the 8th of June, though Mr. Bennett cannot see it, was a sick man and confined to his bed, when the revelations in question met his ear. A door, not of the best joiner's workmanship, as I can testify from having seen it, though locked, easily transmitted sound, and could be little proof to the loud voice of one of the party; and as thus our authority cannot be regarded in the light of a spy, neither does he come forward in the character of a public informer. He speaks to a friend of these occurrences at Kissingen, and this friend, without his permission, upon the spur of the moment, on reading the appointment to the

Frome Vicarage, makes them known. But when they thus became known, far from wishing to retract what he had said, or to hush up what he felt might bring odium upon himself, he came forward with what further evidence he possessed. It is certain that he felt strongly, and his language is far from complimentary-" It is only from a fervent zeal," he says, "for the cause of the Gospel truth and an intense disgust at the hypocrisy of the man, that in any event, I should like to bring charges, which exclusive of the compulsion of duty that would necessitate them, must have the appearance of underhand observation."*

OPINION ABROAD.

In another part, (page 67,) we find Mr. Bennett stating that "we are becoming a laughing stock in the eyes of foreign lands, who have hitherto looked up to us as their leaders in religious freedom," and he cites the opinion of a French journalist on the debates of the 8th of June. The writer considers that there is a manifest inconsistency between the decision on the Gorham case, and the attempt of the House of Commons to set aside the rights of the Patroness and Bishop in nominating and instituting Mr. Bennett to this vicarage. In the first place, I think, we shall, none of us, feel disposed to receive the French ideas on the principles of consistency; while, if we looked to the opinion of the more stable and reflective Germans, we should find a very different commentary on the debates in question. It is true I am not furnished with an extract from one of their journals, but being in Germany at the time, I had an opportunity of hearing the comments on the subject which were made in society; and these expressed surprise, not at the severity which the discussion evinced, but that in England, the supposed bulwark of Protestantism, such abuses could be allowed. The opinion appeared to be that a Protestant Clergyman professing such doctrines and following such practices, should be

* See in Times newspaper the extract of the letter read in the debate of the 8th of June.