all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church. I doubt that uncharitable anathema is more in the spirit of the Old Testament than of the New."[1] While Johnson censured the frigid indifference of the Scotch, he did not forget the ruin that was being slowly worked in England by the avarice and neglect of deans and canons. "Let us not," he wrote, "make
Elgin Cathedral.
too much haste to despise our neighbours. Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation. It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence, and we are in danger of doing that deliberately which the Scots did not do but in the unsettled state of an imperfect constitution." He had learnt, there seems good reason to believe, that the chapter of the cathedral of his own town of Lichfield intended to strip the lead off its roof and cover it instead with
- ↑ Walpole's Letters, vii. 484. It was only one ship that was lost, though in it the lead of two cathedrals was conveyed.
