ROBERT, bishop of Lincoln, was born at Rotherham, in Yorkshire, on the 19th of September 1587. He was descended of an ancient family, and attended the grammar-school at Rotherham, where he made such wonderful proficiency in the languages that at thirteen it was judged proper to send him to Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1608 he was appointed logic-reader in the same college. He took orders in 1611, and was promoted successively to several benefices. Archbishop Laud recommended him to Charles I. as a profound casuist; and that monarch, who seems to have been a great admirer of casuistical learning, appointed him one of his chaplains in 1631. The king regularly attended his sermons, and was wont to say that he "carried his ears to hear other preachers, but his conscience to hear Mr Sanderson." Chancing to be with the king at Oxford in 1636 he was made a D.D. In 1642 Charles created him regius professor of divinity at Oxford, with the canony of Christ Church annexed. But the civil wars prevented him until 1646 from entering on the office; and in 1648 he was ejected by the visitors which the Parliament had commissioned. When the parliament proposed the abolition of the episcopal form of church government, as incompatible with monarchy, Sandoval. Charles desired him to take the subject under his consideration, and deliver his opinion. He accordingly wrote a treatise entitled Episcopacy, as established by Law in England, not prejudicial to Royal Power, 1661. The king afterwards advised him to publish cases of conscience. He replied that "he was now grown old, and unfit to write cases of conscience." The king said, "It was the simplest thing he had ever heard from him; for no young man was fit to be a judge, or write cases of conscience." Izaak Walton, who wrote the life of Dr Sanderson, informs us, that in one of these conferences the king told Sanderson, or one of the rest who was then in company, that "the remembrance of two errors did much affect him, which were his assent to the Earl of Strafford's death, and the abolishing of episcopacy in Scotland; and that if God ever restored him to the peaceable possession of his crown, he would prove his repentance by a public confession and a voluntary penance, by walking barefoot from the Tower of London, or Whitehall, to St Paul's Church, and would desire the people to intercede with God for his pardon." Boyle, having read a work of Dr Sanderson's, entitled De Juramentis Obligatione, 1661, was so much pleased that he requested the author to write his Censor of Conscience, with which Sanderson complied, 1678. When Charles II. was reinstated on the throne, he recovered his professorship and canonry, and soon afterwards was promoted to the bishopric of Lincoln. During the two years and a half in which he possessed this new office, he spent a considerable sum in augmenting poor vicarages, and in repairing the palace at Budgen. He died on the 29th of January 1662-63, in his seventy-sixth year. His works not already mentioned are as follows:—In 1615 he published Logica Artis Compendium, which was the system of lectures he had delivered in the university when he was logic-reader; Sermons, amounting in number to thirty-six, printed in 1631, folio, with the author's Life by Walton; De Obligations Conscientia; Censurae of Mr Antony Ascham his book of the Confusions and Revolutions of Government; Pax Ecclesia, concerning Predestination, or the five points. Besides these he wrote two Discourses in defence of Usher's writings. (See The Works of Robert Sanderson, D.D., now first collected by Dr William Jacksonson, in 6 vols., Oxford, 1854.)