[382] Now Bishop of Llandaff, one of the _poorest_ Bishopricks in this
kingdom. His Lordship has written with much zeal to show the propriety
of _equalizing_ the revenues of Bishops. He has informed us that he has
burnt all his chemical papers. The friends of our excellent
constitution, now assailed on every side by innovators and levellers,
would have less regretted the suppression of some of this Lordship's
other writings. BOSWELL. Boswell refers to _A Letter to the Archbishop
of Canterbury by Richard, Lord Bishop of Landaff_, 1782. If the revenues
were made more equal, 'the poorer Bishops,' the Bishop writes, 'would be
freed from the necessity of holding ecclesiastical preferments _in
commendam_ with their Bishopricks,' p. 8.
[383] De Quincey says that Sir Humphry Davy told him, 'that he could
scarcely imagine a time, or a condition of the science, in which the
Bishop's _Essays_ would be superannuated.' De Quincey's _Works_, ii.
106. De Quincey describes the Bishop as being 'always a discontented
man, a railer at the government and the age, which could permit such as
his to pine away ingloriously in one of the humblest among the
Bishopricks.
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