Charges are excellent summaries of the pastoral duties; and his Lectures on the Catechism have not been surpassed *. This excellent prelate died A.D. 1768; and was succeeded in the primacy by Dr. Cornwallis.

III. There is no hierarchy in talent; yet, among the inferior ranks of the church, we shall now search in vain for men of higher endowments, than most of the dignitaries above enumerated. The unfortunate Dr. Dodd was long a popular preacher, in various chapels of the metropolis. He contributed, in an especial manner, to the support of the Magdalene charity: but his example defeated the good effects of his advice. Having offered to the Chancellor's lady, in an anonymous letter, a bribe of 3000l. for the presentation to the living of St. George's, Hanover Square, he was struck out of the list of His Majesty's Chaplains. Pressed by the calls of his extravagance, he at length forged a bond for 4200l. but certainly with the hope of discharging it before it became due-on his pupil and patron Lord Chesterfield: and being brought to trial, was executed at Tyburn, A.D. 1777; exactly on the spot where the turnpike-house now stands. Many and powerful were the exertions made, to obtain the Royal clemency:-but the King stood inflexible;-replying, that if Dodd were pardoned, the

* Life by Bishop Porteus.

Perreaus, previously executed for the same offence, were murdered. This was no reason: the Royal pardon is not bound by precedents; and for Dodd to have lived, degraded and disgraced, might perhaps have been sufficient punishment. It is singular, that this divine, by a presentiment opposite to that of Phalaris, should have penned a treatise on the impropriety of capital punishments. His speech on his trial, and sermon to the prisoners, were written by Dr. Johnson: but the speech was better adapted to the occasion than the sermon; for who would go about making pedantic divisions and distinctions, with the halter about his neck, and the coffin yawning before his eyes? As for his Prison Thoughts, they are rhapsodies of his own. Thus fell Dodd, undone by vanity and extravagance; a Demas, as he was characterized by his friend Bishop Horne: yet not to be mentioned in the same class of criminality with the execrable Bishop Atherton; whose canting repentance, after a life of horror, is preferred in a late puritanical publication, to the irregularities and compunction of Dodd. The Sermons to Young Men, and Discourses on the Parables and Miracles, are only elegant and respectable publications; evincing, like the strange orations of Edward Irving, how greatly manner must contribute to popularity, and how widely morning preachers err by appearing in print. Their performances are the nosegays of a

of a day, which can

never be set in pots. Dodd's Family Bible has not been excelled; not even by the well-patronised labours of Mant and Doyley, which, however sound in orthodoxy, and edifying in moral tendency, are deficient in illustrative comment*.

Churchill coveted the fame of a poet; and verily he had his reward. As a divine, he sold cyder, wrote satires, frequented theatres, kept a mistress, and joined Wilkes: nor could we balance these qualities by any favourable record, if he had not left a respectable volume of Discourses on the Petitions of the Lord's Prayer. He died in 1764.

of

A warmer praise may be awarded to Dr. Young, the celebrated author of the NIGHT THOUGHTS, which were written at his rectory Welwyn, in Hertfordshire, in the sixtieth year of his age. Lorenzo was his own son, whose dissipation he at length forgave. Nerissa and Philander were the son and daughter of his wife; and all three are deplored in well-known lines, which would be more affecting, if they were less affected:

"Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?

Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain,
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon renewed her horns."

• Hewlett's Bible is said to be a new and improved edition of Dodd's, which Dr. Gregory, the original editor, did not live to complete.

His favourite walk at Welwyn was the churchyard; and all his thoughts and occupations were tinged with a hue of death. In his garden was painted the similitude of an alcove; and to those who approached the fallacy was addressed this inscription-Invisibilia non decipiunt. His Night Thoughts were written beneath a lamp placed in a skull; yet he instituted an assembly and a bowling green in his parish, and loved innocent sports. His wit was often levelled against the enemies of religion and decency. Voltaire's abuse of Milton drew from Young the epigram,

"You are so witty, profligate, and thin,

You seem like Milton, with his Death, and Sin."

It is said, that finding himself one day unable to excite attention amongst his congregation at St. James's, he sate down in the pulpit, and burst into a flood of tears. Young, early in life, had published a Paraphrase on the Book of Job. With his plays, satires, and political writings, this history has no concern. It was his merit to invest religion in the charms of poetry; and Philosophy discourses eloquently in his arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul. He died in 1765.

The Sermons of Sterne contain more of wit than of divinity. It is impossible to suppose

him to have been in earnest; or ever to have produced a serious impression *.

Sterne's other works, full of affected sensibility, were sentimentalized while his mother was lying in a jail. Resurrection men made their profit of his remains, which were recognized under dissection, in the anatomical school of Oxford; and restored to the cemetery of St. George's Hanover Square, at Tyburn, with a jolly epitaph, framed by the freemasons: "Alas! poor Yorick." A like service of disinterment and dissection has been performed towards his literary character, by Dr. Ferriar, of Manchester, who has laid open the plagiarisms of this sentimentalist, from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Bishop Hall's works, and other old books. He died in 1768.

Jones, of Nayland, has already been honourably noticed, as author of the celebrated treatise on the Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity. His Book of Nature, the little bud of his Lectures on

*Take, for a specimen, his account of the prodigal son: "How shall the youth make his father comprehend, that he was cheated at Damascus by one of the best men in the world that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his richest pearl, and anointed the whole city with the balm of Gilead: that the apes and peacocks, which he had sent for from Tarshish, lay dead upon his hands; and that the mummies had not been dead long enough, which had been brought him out of Egypt ?"