He cordially detested the Duke of Newcastle, who was one of his father's opponents and supplanters, and he thus describes the duke's visit to Court when he was to be prime minister in 1754

On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to court for the first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When the closet door opened, he flung himself at his length at the king's feet, sobbed and cried, God bless your majesty! God preserve your majesty!' and lay there howling and embracing the king's knees with one foot so extended that my lord C., who was luckily in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire with For God's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress,' endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar out with pain.

In 1760 Walpole was present at the funeral of George II., and in his description the scene loses its solemnity and becomes dismal and ludicrous.

When we came to the chapel of Henry the Seventh, all solemnity and decorum ceased; no order was observed; people sat or stood where they could or would; the yeomen of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense weight of the coffin; the bishop read sadly, and blundered in the prayers; the fine chapter Man that is born of a woman was chaunted, not read; and the anthem, besides being immeasurably tedious, would have served as well for a nuptial.

The real serious part was the figure of the duke of Cumberland, heightened by a thousand melancholy circumstances. He had a dark brown adonis, and a cloak of black cloth with a train of five yards. Attending the funeral of a father could not be pleasant; his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it near two hours; his face bloated and distorted with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, one of his eyes; and placed over the mouth of the vault, into which in all probability he must himself so soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation! He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance.

This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque duke of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling bottle: but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his

hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who was, or was not, there, spying with one hand, and mopping his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and, turning round, found it was the duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble.

Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto,' a novel which was once famous, the Anecdotes of Painting,' a work which is still interesting, besides several other works, but his letters are best of all.

He died in 1797, and a few weeks before his death he draws a melancholy picture of himself.

At home I see only a few charitable elders, except about fourscore nephews and nieces of various ages who are each brought to me once a year to stare at me as the Methusalem of the family; and they can only speak of their own contemporaries, which interest me no more than if they talked of their dolls, or bats and balls.

BISHOP BUTLER

THE eighteenth century has received condemnation from all kinds of men. Dr. Pusey speaks of it as the deadest and shallowest period of English theology and of the English church.' Mark Pattison describes it as 'an age destitute of depth or earnestness; an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without insight, and whose public men were without character.' The pictures of Hogarth bear witness to the great prevalence of cruelty, drunkenness, and other vices, and the philosopher David Hartley speaks of the great growth of atheism and infidelity, particularly amongst the governing parts of these States,' and of the open

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and abandoned lewdness to which great numbers of both sexes, especially in the high ranks of life, have given themselves up.'

The witty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says that

honour, virtue, reputation, etc., which we used to hear of in our nursery, are as much laid aside and forgotten as crumpled ribands; and the appellation of rake is as genteel in a woman as in a man of quality. And I was told by a very good author, who is deep in the secret, that at this very minute there is a bill cooking-up, at Sir Robert Walpole's hunting seat in Norfolk, to have not taken out of the Commandments and clapped into the Creed, in the ensuing session of parliament.

Such a condition of things was the outcome of various causes which are not easy to trace, but the prevailing philosophy had no doubt much to do with it. Locke himself, says Carlyle, though a humble-minded and religious man, had paved the way for banishing religion from the world.

Freethinkers abounded: Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, Collins and Toland, Tindal and Woolston and others; and Bishop Butler, of whom we have now to speak, says in the introduction to his great work:

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many Persons, that Christianity is not so much as a Subject of Inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present Age, this were an agreed Point amongst all People of Discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal Subject of Mirth and Ridicule, as it were by Way of Reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the Pleasures of the World.

Joseph Butler was born in 1692 at Wantage, where his father was a prosperous linen and woollen draper. He was carefully educated at a dissenting Academy at Tewkesbury, and several youths who afterwards rose to eminence were his schoolfellows.

Dr. Samuel Clarke was at that time the ablest metaphysician in England, and he had recently written A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God,' which work greatly interested Butler, and a series of five letters with answers which passed between him and Dr. Clarke have been preserved.

In the first of these letters Butler says:

I have made it, sir, my business, ever since I thought myself capable of such sort of reasoning, to prove to myself the being and attributes of God. And being sensible that it is a matter of the last consequence, I endeavoured, after a demonstrative proof, not only more fully to satisfy my own mind, but also in order to defend the great truths of natural religion, and those of the Christian revelation which follow from them, against all opposers; but must own with concern that hitherto I have been unsuccessful; and though I have got very probable arguments, yet I can go but a very little way with demonstration in the proof of those things.

Butler was at this time only twenty-one, and the letter is interesting as showing that his mind had already taken its final bent.

In 1714 he went to Oxford, but the course of study was distasteful to him.

We are obliged to misspend so much time here in attending frivolous lectures and unintelligible disputations, that I am quite tired out with such a disagreeable way of trifling.

A few years later he was ordained, and in 1718 he was appointed preacher at the Rolls Chapel. This post he retained for eight years, and fifteen sermons have been preserved of the many which he preached there.

The first three On Human Nature' are especially famous, and from them Sir James Mackintosh declared he had learnt all his philosophy.' In these sermons

Butler combated the ignoble views of human nature held by Hobbes of Malmesbury and some other philosophers, who regarded the state of nature as a state of war, and who held that benevolence and pity were only forms of self-love, and charity only a gratification of our love of power.

Butler on the other hand maintained :

It is as manifest that we were made for Society and to promote the Happiness of it, as that we were intended to take Care of our own Life and Health and private good.

As there is no such Thing as Self-hatred, so neither is there any such Thing as Ill-will in one Man towards another, Emulation and Resentment being away; whereas there is plainly Benevolence or Good-will; there is no such thing as Love of Injustice, Oppression, Treachery, Ingratitude, but only eager Desires after such and such external Goods; which, according to a very ancient Observation, the most abandoned would choose to obtain by innocent Means if they were as easy and as effectual to their End.

In 1725 Butler received the rich living of Stanhope in Weardale, and in the deep seclusion of this distant parish he spent seven years in writing his great work 'The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature.'

He takes in this work as a kind of text a remark of Origen that

he who believes the Scripture to have proceeded from Him who is the Author of Nature, may well expect to find the same sort of Difficulties in it as are found in the Constitution of Nature.

And to this Butler himself adds that

he who denies the Scripture to have been from God on Account of these difficulties, may, for the very same Reason, deny the World to have been formed by Him. On-the other hand, if there be an Analogy or Likeness between that System of Things and Dispensation of Providence which