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Partly out of humorous compassion for the applicant who had offered rudeness, if not insult to the person whom he was most anxious to propitiate; partly because on inquiry he ascertained the respectability of the applicant; and partly because he wished to seal by kindness the lips of a man who could report on the authority of his own eyes that the best lawyer was also the worst shot in all England, Eldon gave the petitioner the desired preferment.
Floating thus easily into preferment, without a shoal or rock in his course, fairly wealthy, and belonging to a well-esteemed county family, connected through his brother with the very elite of literary society, it seemed as though, in the laxity of the early part of the century, Reginald Heber could hardly have helped falling into the indolence of learned ease, the peril of the well-beneficed clergy of his day, especially among those who had not accepted the peculiarities of the awakening school of the period.
The dukes of Mercia rebell against Oswie, recouer their owne bounds, and create Wulfhere their king; Cenwald king of the Westsaxons fighteth with the Britaines and preuaileth, he is vanquished by Wulfhere; Adelwold king of Sussex hath the Ile of Wight giuen him, and why; succession of Edelher, Edelwald, and Aldulfe in the kingdome of Eastangles; Colman a Scot first made bishop of Northumberland, controuersie about the obseruation of Easter, about bald crownes or shauing the haire, superstition punished by God, Ceadda bishop of Yorke, his course of life and diligence in his office commended; Egbert king of Kent, the see of Canturburie void, the preferment thereto refused, Theodore a moonke supplieth the roome at the popes appointment, all the English clergie obey him as their head, his visitation and reformation, singing vsed in churches, Theodore and Adrian woorthilie praised, English men happie, glasiers first brought into this Iland.
Foiled in his design of making this officer the instrument of his base scheme, he summoned to his presence Sir James Tyrrel, a man of reckless character, ready for whatever might bring him profit or preferment; and to him he confided his wishes.
To those of us who are wiser than he, who know that simple honesty and public spirit and self-respect and contempt of sneaking and fawning and bribery and crawling are the conditions of political preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this, must naturally seem to be a queer, wrong-headed, and rather super-celestial American, who had lived too much in the heated atmosphere of European aristocracies and altogether too little in the pure and bracing air of American ward politics and caucuses and conventions.
Now to deny a man the preferment which he merits, and to give it to another man who doth not merit it, is a manifest act of injustice, and is consequently inconsistent with both honour and honesty. Nor is it only an act of injustice to the man himself, but to the public, for whose good principally all public offices are, or ought to be, instituted.
In the midst of this unspeakable greatness, Earth swings like one of the motes which a passing sunbeam illumines. Upon this mote, one fifth of the inhabitants have assumed supreme knowledge and understanding, given them, doubtless, because of their innate superiority. This preferment, also, is theirs by the grace of an infinitely just and merciful God.
Plainly the intention of the document was to place Michizane on a footing at least equal to that of Tokihira. Michizane understood the perils of such preferment. He knew that the scion of a comparatively obscure family would not be tolerated as a rival by the Fujiwara. Three times he declined the high post offered to him.
He became the friend of Sir H. Wotton, Donne, and Bacon, the last of whom is said to have held him in such high esteem as to submit his writings to him before publication. He acquired the favour of James I., who conferred upon him a sinecure worth £120 a year, and having powerful friends, he attached himself for some time to the Court in the hope of preferment.
Ah me! and if he was to be perpetual curate, and none of his great friends thought upon him, or had preferment to bestow, how do you suppose he could ever, ever marry Lucy Wodehouse, if they were to wait a hundred years? Just then the garden-gate the green gate in the wall opened to the creaking murmur of Mr Wodehouse's own key. Mr Wodehouse was a man who creaked universally.
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