an alteration.[74] In regard of the questions specially at issue with the Nonjurors, he heartily assented for his own part to the principles of the Revolution, maintaining ’for a certain truth that as the law makes the king, so the same law extends or limits or transfers our obedience and allegiance.’[75] This being the case, it may at first appear unintelligible that an ardent nonjuring champion of passive obedience and non-resistance should assert that ’by none are these truly Catholic doctrines more openly avowed than by the present excellent metropolitan of York.’[76] But Dodwell was correct.  Archbishop Sharp, with perfect consistency, combined with Whig politics the favourite High Church tenet of the Jacobean era.  He strenuously maintained the duty of passive obedience, not however to the sovereign monarch, but to the sovereign law.[77] At the same time he felt much sympathy with the Nonjurors, and was sometimes accused of Jacobitism because he would not drop his acquaintance with them, nor disguise his pity for the sacrifices in which their principles involved them.  When a choice was given him of two or three of the sees vacated by the deprivation of the nonjuring bishops, he declined the offer.  He would not allow that there had been any real unlawfulness or irregularity in their dispossession, but as a matter of personal feeling he disliked the idea of accepting promotion under such circumstances.  Although therefore, in many ways, he differed much in opinion from the Nonjurors, he possessed in a great degree their attachment and respect.  Robert Nelson was neither the only one of them with whom he was on terms of cordial friendship, nor was he by any means the only one whom he persuaded to return to the Established Communion.

Bishop Smalridge of Bristol should be referred to, however briefly, in connection with the truly worthy man who is the main subject of this paper.  He was constantly associated with Nelson in his various works of charity, especially in forwarding missionary undertakings, in assisting Dr. Bray’s projects of parochial lending libraries, and as a royal commissioner with him for the increase of church accommodation.  Nelson bequeathed to him his Madonna by Correggio ’as a small testimony of that great value and respect I bear to his lordship;’[78] and to his accomplished pen is owing the very beautiful Latin epitaph placed to his friend’s memory in St. George the Martyr’s, Queen Square.[79] Under the name of ‘Favonius,’ he is spoken of in the ‘Tatler’ in the warmest language of admiring respect, as a very humane and good man, of well-tempered zeal and touching eloquence, and ’abounding with that sort of virtue and knowledge which makes religion beautiful.’[80] Bishop Newton has also spoken very highly of him, and adds that he was a man of much gravity and dignity and of great complacency and sweetness of manner.  In reference to this last feature of his character, it was said of him, when he succeeded Atterbury as