Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 | Page 9

list given by
Fuller from the time of Henry VIII.?
D.
Harris.--The Rev. William Harris, B.A., was presented, by Thomas
Pindar, Esq., to the vicarage of Luddington, Lincolnshire, on the 7th
August, 1722. Mr. Harris died here in June, 1748, aged eighty-two. On
his tomb is inscribed,--
"Illi satis licuit Nunc veterum libris, nunc Somno, et inertibus horis
Ducere solicitæ jucunda oblivio vitæ."
A tradition of his being a wizard still lingers in the village, and I should
be very glad to receive any particulars respecting him. From an
inspection of his will at Lincoln, it appears that he used the coat of the
ancient family of Harris of Radford, Devon, and that his wife's name
was Honora, a Christian name not infrequent about that period in
families of the West of England also, as, for instance, Honora, daughter
of Sir Richard Rogers of Bryanstone, who married Edward Lord
Beauchamp, and had a daughter Honora, who married Sir Ferdinand
Sutton; Honora, the wife of Harry Conway, Esq., of Bodrhyddan, Flint;
Honora, daughter of Edward Fortescue of Fallapit; besides others.

W. H. LAMMIN.
Fulham.
* * * * *
Replies.
BISHOP BUTLER.
(Vol. vii., p. 528.)
"Charity thinketh no evil;" but we must feel both surprise and regret
that any one should, in 1853, consider it a doubtful question whether
Bishop Butler died in the communion of the Church of England. The
bishop has now been in his grave more than a hundred years; but
Warburton says truly, "How light a matter very often subjects the
best-established characters to the suspicions of posterity--how ready is
a remote age to catch at a low revived slander, which the times that
brought it forth saw despised and forgotten almost in its birth."
X. Y. Z. says he would be glad to have this charge (originally brought
forward in 1767) sifted. He will find that it has been sifted, and in the
most full and satisfactory manner, by persons of no less distinction than
Archbishop Secker and Bishop Halifax. The strong language employed
by the archbishop, when refuting what he terms {573} a "gross and
scandalous falsehood," and when asserting the bishops "abhorrence of
popery," need not here be quoted, as "N.& Q." is not the most proper
channel for the discussion of theological subjects; but it is alleged that
every man of sense and candour was convinced at the time that the
charge should be retracted; and it must be a satisfaction to your
correspondent to know, that as Bishop Butler lived so he died, in full
communion with that Church, which he adorned equally by his
matchless writings, sanctity of manners, and spotless life.[4]
J. H. MARKLAND.
Bath.

[Footnote 4: Your correspondent may be referred to Memoirs of the
Life of Bishop Butler, by a connexion of his own, the Rev. Thomas
Bartlett, A.M., published in 1839; and to a review of the same work in
the Quarterly Review, vol. lxiv. p. 331.]
In reference to the Query by X. Y. Z., as to whether Bishop Butler died
in the Roman Catholic communion, allow me to refer your
correspondent to the contents of the letters from Dr. Forster and Bishop
Benson to Secker, then Bishop of Oxford, concerning the last illness
and death of the prelate in question, deposited at Lambeth amongst the
private MSS. of Archbishop Seeker, "as negative arguments against the
calumny of his dying a Papist."
Than the allegations that Butler died with a Roman Catholic book of
devotion in his hand, and that the last person in whose company he was
seen was a priest of that persuasion, nothing can be more unreasonable,
if at least it be meant to deduce from these unproved statements that the
bishop agreed with the one and held communion with the other. Dr.
Forster, his chaplain, was with him at his death, which happened about
11 A.M., June 16; and this witness observes (in a letter to the Bishop of
Oxford, June 18) that "the last four-and-twenty hours preceding which
[i. e. his death] were divided between short broken slumbers, and
intervals of a calm but disordered talk when awake." Again (letter to
Ditto, June 17), Forster says that Bishop Butler, "when, for a day or
two before his death, he had in a great measure lost the use of his
faculties, was perpetually talking of writing to your lordship, though
without seeming to have anything which, at least, he was at all capable
of communicating to you." Bishop Benson writes to the Bishop of
Oxford (June 12) that Butler's "attention to any one or anything is
immediately lost and gone;" and, "my lord is incapable, not only of
reading, but attending to anything read or said." And again, "his
attention to anything is very little or none."
There was certainly an interval between