taking lodgings only in Covent Garden, London, for an occasional attendance in Parliament. Enough has been said to shew that he was a man pre-eminently gifted with the faculty of speech, yet, as a spiritual peer he was silent, "and so he was the cause others spoke not so much as they intended, awing the zeal of the most unruly to a moderation, by the discretion, good advice, and management of his own." He was naturally indeed a man of few words; for, as we have seen, King Charles loved him the more for this good quality. This was the calm, and sober, and judicious course he pursued amid the difficulties and dangers that surrounded the Established Church. That jealousies and animosities were easier raised than allayed, was as much a rule of his own life as a precept of wisdom for others to go by. Had the rest of his Episcopal brethren followed his example and his admonitions they would have deferred, if not avoided, the impeachment for High Treason; and perhaps their exclusion as members from the Upper House of Parliament. He was not one of the twelve bishops who signed the petition, which was made the pretext and groundwork of the prosecution, and therefore escaped the popular violence and the dangers of the Tower*; but his prudence and

*

p. 51.

See Trial of the Bishops in State Trials. Whitelocke,

moderation did not save him from that infernal engine, which on January 9, 1641, swept them, one and all, like a whirlwind from their legislative seats. Fuller says" that he was the last bishop that dyed a member of Parliament in the year of our Lord 1642." He certainly died in that year, but he did not die a member of Parliament, for he fell with the rest. The plea of Puritanism, to use a Red-Republican phrase, was now too late. Besides, the offences usually in times of strife imputed to men of rank in the Church, were now imputed to him, and he was set down as a Papist, merely because he was a Bishop. When in London he preached much and often. He was accounted a Godly and powerful preacher; and his sentiments were generally approved of. "There need (concludes Lloyd) no more added to his life, or written on his grave, than that this was the man-1. That had been a constant preacher, and reputed at his death that he had not been a more constant catechist. 2. That interceded for liberty of conscience so long for non-conformists with the King, till he saw that neither the King nor himself could enjoy their own consciences. That feared the pretence of religion would overthrow the reality of it, and that the divisions in his age would breed Atheism in the next." Naturally of a weak constitution, still more enfeebled by hard study, broken-hearted, and broken down by the

accumulated and accumulating calamities of his country; spared, however, the murder of his Sovereign, he at last sunk under them;

"And to add greater honours to his age

Than man could give him, he died, fearing God."

As his gifts, like those of the Primitive Christians, had ever been in common, he died poor-poor in worldly goods, but rich in blessing; his richest legacies were his precepts and his example; his best monument the hearts of his people. And as his goods were in common, so was his house a common sanctuary; numbers fled to it for protection against the persecuting spirit of the ComHe gathered non-conformists and recusants under his wings as a hen gathers her chickens, and they were as safe in person, as free in conscience. His wife lost in him one of the best of husbands; his servants one of the best of masters; the orphan a father; the widow a friend; the poor and needy a comforter; the persecuted and oppressed a protector.

mons.

He died at his lodgings in Covent Garden, in January 1642, and was buried in St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, where the monument erected to his memory was, with the sacred edifice, destroyed by fire in 1795.

Until the hand of Charity, or the generosity of

his fellow-countrymen, put up some storied urn or animated bust to mark his resting place, let this serve as his Epitaph and Elegy

"Alas! poor POTTER !"

HE bulk of mankind are either knaves or

fools, and, like the fly in the fable, are never so much pleased, nor yet so much admired, as when the wheel of life is spinning round, and they fancy they are the prime movers of the dust that envelopes them. The void is filled up by the good, who (ordained by Providence as a compensating

*See Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, 237 (London, 1840.) Wood's Ath. Oxon. in Life of Dr. Wm. Bayley, his successor in the See of Clonfert. Cotton's Fasti. Eccl. Hib. Eicke's Eccl. Reg. Nicolson's Annals of Kendal.