Bishop Bonner's ghost

Table of contents

- [titlepage]

- THE ARGUMENT.

- [note]

BONNER's GHOST.

REFORMER, hold! ah! spare my shade,

Respect the hallow'd dead;

Vain pray'r! I see the op'ning glade,

See utter darkness fled.

Just so your innovating hand

Let in the moral light;

So, chas'd from this bewilder'd land,

Fled intellectual night.

Where now that holy gloom which hid

Fair truth from vulgar ken?

Where now that wisdom which forbid

To think that monks were men?

The tangled mazes of the schools

Which spread so thick before,

Which knaves intwin'd to puzzle fools,

Shall catch mankind no more.

Those charming intricacies where?

Those venerable lies?

Those legends, once the church's care,

Those sweet perplexities?

Ah! fatal age, whose sons combin'd

Of credit to exhaust us;

Ah! fatal age, which gave mankind

A Luther and a Faustus! [*]

Had only Jack and Martin [†] liv'd,

Our pow'r had slowly fled;

Our influence longer had surviv'd

Had laymen never read.

For knowledge flew, like magic spell,

By typographic art:

Oh, shame! a peasant now can tell

If priests the truth impart.

Ye councils, pilgrimages, creeds!

Synods, decrees, and rules!

Ye warrants of unholy deeds,

Indulgencies and bulls!

Where are ye now? and where, alas!

The pardons we dispense?

And penances, the sponge of sins;

And Peter's holy pence?

Where now the beads, which us'd to swell

Lean virtue's spare amount?

Here only faith and goodness fill

A heretic's account.

But soft—what gracious form appears?

Is this a convent's life?

Atrocious sight! by all my fears,

A prelate with a wife!

Ah! sainted Mary, [*] not for this

Our pious labours join'd;

The witcheries of domestic bliss

Had shook ev'n Gardiner's mind.

Hence all the sinful, human ties,

Which mar the cloyster's plan;

Hence all the weak fond charities,

Which make man feel for man.

But tortur'd memory vainly speaks

The projects we design'd,

While this apostate bishop seeks

The freedom of mankind.

Oh, born in ev'ry thing to shake

The systems plann'd by me!

So heterodox, that he wou'd make

Both soul and body free.

Nor clime nor colour stays his hand;

With charity deprav'd,

He wou'd, from Thames' to Gambia's strand,

Have all be free and sav'd.

And who shall change his wayward heart;

His wilful spirit turn?

For those his labours can't convert,

His weakness will not burn.

Ann. Dom. 1900.
A GOOD OLD PAPIST.

Notes

*
The same age which brought heresy into the church unhappily introduced printing among the arts, by which means the scriptures were unluckily disseminated among the vulgar.
↵

†
How bishop Bonner came to have read Swist's Tale of a Tub it may now be in vain to inquire.
↵

*
An orthodox queen of the 16th. century, who laboured with might and main, conjointly with these two venerable bishops to extinguish a dangerous heresy y-cleped the reformation.
↵

BISHOP BONNER's GHOST.

STRAWBERRY-HILL: PRINTED BY THOMAS KIRGATE, MDCCLXXXIX.

THE ARGUMENT.

IN the gardens of the palace at Fulham is a dark recess; at the end of this stands a chair which once belonged to bishop Bonner.—A certain bishop of London, more than 200 years after the death of the aforesaid Bonner, just as the clock of the gothic chapel had struck six, undertook to cut with his own hand a narrow walk thro' this thicket, which is since called the monk's walk. He had no sooner begun to clear the way than, lo! suddenly up-started from the chair the ghost of bishop Bonner, who in a tone of just and bitter indignation uttered the following verses.

By the lapse of time the three last stanzas are become unintelligible. Old chronicles say, that towards the latter end of the 18th century a bill was brought into the British parliament by an active young reformer for the abolition of a pretended traffic of the human species. But this only shews how little faith is to be given to the exaggerations of history, for as no vestige of this incredible trade now remains, we look upon the whole story to have been one of those fictions, not uncommon among authors, to blacken the memory of former ages.

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Title statement

Bishop Bonner's ghost

More, Hannah, 1745-1833.

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University of Oxford Text Archive
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ID [ota]

http://ota.ox.ac.uk/id/3854

ID [isbn10]

1106008537

ID [isbn13]

9781106008534

ID [TCP]

K031233.000

ID [BIBNO]

cw3313450273

ID [ECLL]

0593900400

Availability

Distributed by the University of Oxford under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Source

— Bishop Bonner's ghost, More, Hannah, 1745-1833.. [4],4p.,ill. ; 4⁰. [Twickenham] :: Strawberry-Hill: Printed by Thomas Kirgate,. 1789.. [In verse.] [Page 4 signed: A good old papist, Ann. Dom. 1900.] [Anonymous. By Hannah More.] [Bishop Bonner = Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London.] [Reproduction of original from the British Library.] [Hazen, no.34] [English Short Title Catalog, ESTCT22825.] [Electronic data. Farmington Hills, Mich. : Thomson Gale, 2003. Page image (PNG). Digitized image of the microfilm version produced in Woodbridge, CT by Research Publications, 1982-2002 (later known as Primary Source Microfilm, an imprint of the Gale Group).]

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