He wrote as quickly as he read.  When once he had amassed the necessary facts, he sate down amid all the distracting sights and sounds of a drawing-room crowded with femininity, and wrote at full speed, without deliberations, embellishments, or erasures; only betraying by the movements of his expressive face his amusement and interest “as fresh images came clustering round his pen.”  As soon as the essay was finished, he would throw it on the table, saying to his wife, “There, Kate, just look it over—­dot the i’s and cross the t’s;” and went out for his walk.  It should be added that his writing was singularly difficult to read, that he was very infirm about spelling proper names, and that he was exceptionally careless in correcting his proofs.

Of those essays which he subsequently reprinted, as judging them most worthy of preservation, I see that by 1821 he had written fifty.  Among these were such masterpieces of humour and argument as “Edgeworth on Bulls,” “Methodism,” “Indian Missions,” “Hannah More,” “Public Schools,” “America,” “Game-Laws” and “Botany Bay.”  On the 19th of May 1820, he wrote, “I found in London both my articles very popular—­upon the Poor-Laws and America.  The passage on Taxation had great success."[76] Some of these papers will be considered separately, when we come to discuss his style and his opinions; but space must here be found for an unrivalled specimen of his controversial method, which belongs to the year 1822.  It is called “Persecuting Bishops.”  “Is Bishops in that title a nominative or an accusative?” grimly inquired a living prelate, when the present writer was extolling the essay so named.  It is a nominative; and perhaps the exacter title would have been “A Persecuting Bishop.”

Herbert Marsh[77] was Second Wrangler in 1779, Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Margaret Professor of Divinity, Bishop of Llandaff from 1816 to 1819, and of Peterborough from 1819 till his death.  He was a “High Churchman of the old school”—­perhaps the most unpleasant type of theologian in Christendom.  We know, from the Life of Father “Ignatius” Spencer,[78] that Bishop Marsh played whist with his candidates for Orders on the eve of the ordination, and all that we read about him beautifully illustrates that tone of “quiet worldliness” which Dean Church described as the characteristic of the English clergy in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.  But what he lacked in personal devotion he made up (as some have done since his day) by furious hostility to spiritual and religious enthusiasm in others.  He opposed the civil claims alike of Roman Catholics and of Dissenters.  He attacked the Bible Society.  He denounced Charles Simeon.  He insulted Isaac Milner; and he determined to purge his diocese of Evangelicalism (which, oddly enough, he seems to have identified with Calvinism).  His manly resolve to stifle religious earnestness culminated in the year 1820, when he drew up a set of eighty-seven