Mr. Coleridge seems tolerably certain of his return for Exeter,
but his colleague, Mr. Edgar Bowring, will probably be pushed hard by Sir John Karslake, the Attorney-General, who is canvassing the borough for the Government. Mr. Bowring seems to have been much exercized in his mind by a sermon, to which he was com- pelled to listen, by Archdeacon Freeman, preached in the cathedral against the Liberal policy. The venerable Archdeacon compared the Liberal party toAhithophel, "who rebelled against his sovereign and then hanged himself ;" also to Sennacherib, who assaulted Jeru- salem, the city of God ; also to the leaders of the French Revolu- tion,—ending by predicting that the English Church itself would be abolished just twenty years hence. Mr. Bowring seems to have been somewhat scandalized. He did not like the name of Ahitho- phel-Sennacherib-Robespierre. He thought of the text, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace !" and, in fact, retaliated upon the Archdeacon by, in a sense, preaching against him. It was, however, a capital thing for Mr. Bowriug. It gave him a telling point for his speech. It made his opponents look foolish. And it meant nothing very bad. The venerable gentleman hadn't an idea what Ahithophel, Senna- cherib, &c., were like ; if he had been really savage, he would have prayed for Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Bowriug, but he does not seem to have come to that.
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