It is now about eighty-five years since the passing of that limiting act, and there is but one instance, in the memory of man, of a bishop’s lease broken upon the plea of not being statutable; which, in everybody’s opinion, could have been lost by no other person than he who was then tenant, and happened to be very ungracious in his county.  In the present Bishop of Meath’s[3] case, that plea did not avail, although the lease were notoriously unstatutable; the rent reserved, being, as I have been told, not a seventh part of the real value; yet the jury, upon their oaths, very gravely found it to be according to the statute; and one of them was heard to say, That he would eat his shoes before he would give a verdict for the bishop.  A very few more have made the same attempt with as little success.  Every bishop, and other ecclesiastical body, reckon forty pounds in an hundred to be a reasonable half value; or if it be only a third part, it seldom, or never, breeds any difference between landlord and tenant.  But when the rent is from five to nine or ten parts less than the worth; the bishop, if he consults the good of his see, will be apt to expostulate; and the tenant, if he be an honest man, will have some regard to the reasonableness and justice of the demand, so as to yield to a moderate advancement, rather than engage in a suit, where law and equity are directly against him.  By these means, the bishops have been so true to their trusts, as to procure some small share in the advancement of rents; although it be notorious that they do not receive the third penny (fines included) of the real value of their lands throughout the kingdom.

[Footnote 3:  Dr. Evans, a Welchman. [Faulkner, 1735.]]

I was never able to imagine what inconvenience could accrue to the public, by one or two thousand pounds a year, in the hands of a Protestant bishop, any more than of a lay person.[4] The former, generally speaking, liveth as piously and hospitably as the other; pays his debts as honestly, and spends as much of his revenue among his tenants:  Besides, if they be his immediate tenants, you may distinguish them, at first sight, by their habits and horses; or if you go to their houses, by their comfortable way of living.  But the misfortune is, that such immediate tenants, generally speaking, have others under them, and so a third and fourth in subordination, till it comes to the welder (as they call him) who sits at a rack-rent, and lives as miserably as an Irish farmer upon a new lease from a lay landlord.  But suppose a bishop happens to be avaricious, (as being composed of the same stuff with other men) the consequence to the public is no worse than if he were a squire; for he leaves his fortune to his son, or near relation, who, if he be rich enough, will never think of entering into the Church.

[Footnote 4:  This part of the paragraph is to be applied to the period when the whole was written, which was in 1723, when several of Queen Anne’s bishops were living. [Note in edition of 1761, as amended from the edition of 1735.  T.S.]]