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His claims for preferment were, indeed, peculiarly strong; and when we mention the political influence of himself and his friends, his wife's powerful connections, added to his able pamphlets, and the great mass of sound information regarding the state of the country, which in the discharge of his religious duties, he communicated from time to time to the government of the day we think we have said enough to satisfy our readers that he ought not to be overlooked in the wealthy and pious Establishment, which the Irish Church then was.
Whatever small scraps of preferment might have come in his way had been rejected as having been joined with too much of labour and too little of emolument. He had gone on hoping that so great a man as the Marquis would be able to do something for him, thinking that he might at any rate fasten his patron closely to him by bonds of affection.
The main ambition of his life is not to be discredited; and for other things, his desires are more limited than his fortunes, which he thinks preferment though never so mean, and that he is to do something to deserve this.
Sir Hildebrand, notwithstanding the abruptness of his present manner, had, at one period of his life, known courts and camps; had held a commission in the army which encamped on Hounslow Heath previous to the Revolution and, recommended perhaps by his religion, had been knighted about the same period by the unfortunate and ill-advised James II. But the Knight's dreams of further preferment, if he ever entertained any, had died away at the crisis which drove his patron from the throne, and since that period he had spent a sequestered life upon his native domains.
The only obstacle to our preferment was in obtaining the 'Squire's recommendation; but he had already shewn us too many instances of his friendship to doubt of it now. Even in bed my wife kept up the usual theme: 'Well, faith, my dear Charles, between ourselves, I think we have made an excellent day's work of it. 'Pretty well, cried I, not knowing what to say.
This talent of discretion, as I have described it in its several adjuncts and circumstances, is nowhere so serviceable as to the clergy, to whose preferment nothing is so fatal as the character of wit, politeness in reading or manners, or that kind of behaviour which we contract by having too much conversation with persons of high station and eminency: these qualifications being reckoned, by the vulgar of all ranks, to be marks of levity, which is the last crime the world will pardon in a clergyman; to this I may add a free manner of speaking in mixed company, and too frequent an appearance in places of much resort, which are equally noxious to spiritual promotion.
Owing to the personal weakness of successive monarchs since the death of William III, there had grown up the cabinet system of government which, in 1763, meant the reduction of the King to the position of an honorary figurehead and the actual control of officers, perquisites, patronage, and preferment, as well as the direction of public policy, by the leaders of parliamentary groups.
When I see a woman struggling for political preferment trying to force her way on up to the ballot-box, amid the masculine demagogues who stand, with swollen fists and bloodshot eyes and pestiferous breath, to guard the polls wanting to go through the loaferism and the defilement of popular sovereigns, who crawl up from the saloons greasy and foul and vermin-covered, to decide questions of justice and order and civilization when I see a woman, I say, who wants to press through all that horrible scum to get to the ballot-box, I say: "Ah, what a pity!
But now Stephen declared himself firmly against his preferment, and the necessary papal sanction for his translation from one see to another was not granted.
His friend, the present secretary, had written to him, assuring him that no other probable competitor was spoken of as being in the field against him. If such good fortune awaited him, would it not smooth any present difficulty which lay in the way of his marriage with Lily Dale? But, alas, he had not looked at the matter in that light! Might not the countess help him to this preferment?
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