THOMAS PIERCE, Dean of Sarum--a perpetual controversialist, and to
whom it was dangerous to refuse a request, lest it might raise a
controversy--wanted a prebend of Dr. WARD, Bishop of Salisbury, for
his son Robert. He was refused; and now, studying revenge, he opened a
controversy with the bishop, maintaining that the king had the right
of bestowing all dignities in all cathedrals in the kingdom, and not
the bishops. This required a reply from the bishop, who had been
formerly an active controversialist himself. Dean Pierce renewed his
attack with a folio volume, entitled "A Vindication of the King's
Sovereign Right, &c.," 1683.--Thus it proceeded, and the web thickened
around the bishop in replies and rejoinders. It cost him many tedious
journeys to London, through bad roads, fretting at "the King's
Sovereign Right" all the way; and, in the words of a witness, "in
unseasonable times and weather, that by degrees his spirits were
exhausted, his memory quite gone, and he was totally unfitted for
business."[431] Such was the fatal disturbance occasioned by Dean
Pierce's folio of "The King's Sovereign Right," and his son Bob being
left without a prebend!

I shall close this article with a very ludicrous instance of a
literary quarrel from personal motives. This piece of secret history
had been certainly lost, had not Bishop Lowth condescended to preserve
it, considering it as necessary to assign a sufficient reason for the
extraordinary libel it produced.

Bohun, an antiquarian lawyer, in a work entitled "The English Lawyer,"
in 1732, in illustrating the origin of the Act of _Scandalum
Magnatum_, which arose in the time of William of Wykeham, the
chancellor and bishop of Edward III. and the founder of New College,
in Oxford; took that opportunity of committing the very crime on the
venerable manes of Wykeham himself. He has painted this great man in
the darkest colours. Wykeham is charged with having introduced "Alice
Piers, his niece or," &c., for the truth is he was uncertain who she
was, to use his peculiar language, "into the king's bosom;" to have
joined her in excluding the Black Prince from all power in the state;
and he hints at this hero having been poisoned by them; of Wykeham's
embezzling a million of the public money, and, when chancellor, of
forging an Act of Parliament to indemnify himself, and thus passing
his own pardon. It is a singularity in this libellous romance, that
the contrary of all this only is