CONCLUSION.

AN UNEXPECTED REVELATION.

Persons unaccustomed to research, but possessed of a competent knowledge of letters, naturally take pleasure in tracing in the descriptions of a well-read writer some touches of that literature with which they are themselves familiar. Many persons accordingly thought that Fielding's characters had been ushered into the world half a century before they were due; and that his parsons were above all others the real (or at least the really described) Clergymen whom Mr. Macaulay had in his eye. Others bethought themselves of the dramatists: others perhaps had different opinions of their own. But from henceforth there may probably be but one opinion. Many of Mr. Macaulay's readers had doubtless observed that his description of the Clergy opens in these words :

"The rural clergy were EVEN MORE VEHEMENT IN TORYISM THAN THE RURAL GENTRY."

Now it so falls out that there is a portrait of a Clergyman which agrees in some very important particulars with Mr. Macaulay's description, though, indeed, this Clergyman is not wholly unacquainted with Homer, the study of whose language was "by no means necessary" for an Oxford or "a Cambridge divine." His books too, it may be supposed, were sufficiently numerous, if not to place him among "the unusually lucky" ones, yet at least in the class of those who might be considered lucky. Abating

these advantages which he possessed over Mr. Macaulay's Tory Clergyman, the resemblance is well-nigh complete. His wife's character too "had been blown upon," and was suspected. Yet this man was so far from exceeding the standard of the gentry's Toryism, that he was actually ▲ WHIG: his description is given as follows, in a pamphlet entitled, The Character of a Whig under several Denominations; to which is added The Reverse, or the Character of a True Englishman in opposition to the former, and published without name of author or printer at London in the year 1700. The tract is so rare that its possessor is not aware of the existence of a copy in the public library at Cambridge. The writer had (it need scarcely be said) read Eachard, and almost copies him, except that he applies his knowledge to his own purposes. Apology is due for printing such language as one sentence contains, and it would not have been done but for the absolute necessity of the case. The account is wound up with little else but a history of the sermon, which it would be little to our purpose to introduce, even were it less indecent. Mr. Macaulay too winds up with an account of his parson's violent Tory sermon. Eachard's arrangement is different, and he has nothing to do with politics.

THE CHURCH WHIG, OR THE ECCLESIASTICAL BIFARIUS "Is the offspring of ignorance and nonconformity, who being dieted a while in a country school, upon rules, exceptions, and tedious repetitions of Amo's and TúπTw's till he had learned how Phaeton broke his neck; how many apples Tityrus had for his supper; and understood Homer's commendations of Achilles' toes and the Grecian's boots; knew a hexameter from a pentameter, a spondee from a dactyl, and could fit them in that sense to his finger's end; though his parts were contemptible and the purses of his friends at too low an ebb to maintain him like a scholar, to the University he must go for a little logic and ethics, and is predestinated by his relations to be a Clergyman, in hopes that a benefice where Henry the Eighth had not been too busy

with his toll-dish, but that yet there remained some good land, that afforded milk and honey, might be the portion of our juvenile levite. Now that success might answer the desires of his parents, and that the babe of grace might not surfeit on human learning, the tutor employs him in bed-making, chamber-sweeping, and water-fetching, that the sizar's brains might not be overheated with too much vain philosophy. Having sucked in about six or seven mouthfuls of University air, exactly learned to respond to Quid est logica? and Quot sunt virtutes morales? with Burgurdicius, Eustachius, and such excellent helpmeets in divinity in his coat pocket; down he goes by the first carrier on the top of a pack into the country to propagate the gospel, and by that time he can say his predicaments and his creed you may find him in a pulpit; for now he has the choice of preaching or starving: though it had been ten times better for the lad and the Church that he had been made a tooth-drawer or a porter. Some poor starved vicar, that ne'er could keep a curate in his life, gives him a title to ordination, and then a neighbouring knight takes him into his family at the price of ten pounds ayear, and a Sunday pudding, to perform holy offices and spoil his children by making him their tutor. Being a stranger to the house and a decent behaviour, my cousin Abigail, out of charity and in hope of the benefit of her Clergy, instructs him in the knowledge of a Chaplain's duty, viz. that he must never speak in the parlour but at grace and prayer-time, and be sure with a low bow to rise in time from the table, take away his plate, and march off with his hat under his arm, and cleave a log into billets for the parlour fire, whilst the knight, my lady, and her children eat up the chickens, tarts, and custards, and then calls in the chipling to dismiss them. This obligation upon the young levite gives him a liking to Mrs. Abigail, which she cherishes with the remains of her ladies' caudles and the pills of her China oranges, and lays the foundation of his ruin. To please his mistress, and gain the vicarage that is entailed upon her office by the custom of the manor, he is sometimes found cracking nuts and reading in his study, and having luckily discovered a vacuum in his upper room, he fills it with learned jargon, materia prima, occult qualities and atoms, which the lady of the house observing she breaks out in his commendation, Truly the young man is much improved since

he came into our family. The lady's good word, the knight's good-nature, and Mrs. Abigail's apron-strings growing too short, prefers him at once to a benefice and a belly-piece, where the all-wise patron, and the all-understanding adjoining justice being both severe and sour whigs, the chipling, to gain their favours and re-assume what he was bred to, sets up for a Church Whig also, and leaves nothing unattempted that may shew his respects to the dissenting party. Now he sets up for a conforming dissenter, and carries the fair outside of a man, and is an arrant knave in his heart one that indifferently divides his body and his soul betwixt right and wrong: the government has his head and purtenances, and the schism his affections."-The Character of a Whig under several Denominations; to which is added the Reverse, or the Character of a true Englishman in opposition to the former, pp. 72-75, Lond. 1700.

So it seems,

Even so:

"Quem quærimus, hic est."

"Here our solemn search hath end."

It was a bold and perhaps not very politic stroke of Mr. Macaulay to take the above description, reproduce it mutatis mutandis, and apply it to the Tory Clergy. And all this not in an avowed work of fiction, but in a professed History of England. Some may consider the fraud pious; all must confess its conception facetious: but his joke, once discovered, is at the expense of the author and his history.

APPENDIX.

On Mr. Macaulay's Character of the Gentry.

"My notion," says Mr. Macaulay, "of the country gentleman of the seventeenth century has been derived from sources too numerous to be recapitulated. I must leave my description to the judgment of those who have studied the history and the lighter literature of that age."-(Vol. 1. p. 324).

These things being so, it becomes more difficult to decompose Mr. Macaulay's description into its original elements. However, it may perhaps be possible to discover one source of his information. In The Character of a Whig under several Denominations is an account of the senseless upstart Whig country gentleman, occupying ten pages (pp. 62-72). The writer had in view some Whig gentleman of the day; for he adds at the end of his account, "If this don't reform him and cause him to make restitution, the next setting shall produce his effigies more to the life than this is, and give you his name in words at length, and not in figures." I shall put down in one column passages of his description as given in this pamphlet, and in the other column print select sentences of Mr. Macaulay's description of the Tory aristocracy, which will be found in his third chapter (pp. 319-324).