INTRODUCTION.

THE object of the following pages is to enter upon such an examination of one portion of Mr. Macaulay's History of England, as may enable any person to form some kind of notion as to his general accuracy and merits as an historian.

Mr. Macaulay's work has been read with great interest; and no wonder, for a more attractive book was never written. But if in the midst of its merits, mistakes or exaggerated statements abound, he does a service to the public who puts them on their guard against believing as a matter of course the vivid representations of that entertaining writer.

I have therefore in the following pages considered Mr. Macaulay's account of the social condition of the Clergy about the time of the accession of James the Second, and have tried to take a purely historical view of it.

B

SECTION I.

SURVEY OF MR. MACAULAY'S PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES.

BEFORE entering on a specific examination of the several features of the Clergyman's portrait in the latter part of the 17th century, as drawn by Mr. Macaulay, let us take a preliminary survey of the sources from which it is professedly drawn. We say professedly, for in the course of our inquiry the real original of the picture will be revealed.

The principal authorities to which he refers in vindication of his statements, are Eachard, Oldham, and Wood; others which he cites or alludes to, are either irrelevant or comparatively unimportant, or do not belong to the period of which he is treating, being in some cases very widely removed from it.

Let us then briefly consider the value of these testimonies by which his account is not indeed borne out (as shall be shewn in the proper place), but which more or less substantiate some of its particulars. The first authority in point of time is Eachard: he was Master of St. Catharine's Hall in the University of Cambridge, and in the year 1670 published an anonymous tract, entitled "The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion inquired into. In a Letter written to R. L." His work became excessively popular, and in the year 1685 had reached the ninth edition. The object of his work appears to have been in the main good: he no doubt wished that the information and the incomes of the inferior clergy should be augmented. Want of learning and want of money he

makes two of the principal (though by no means the only) causes which had brought the clergy into contempt. These causes were probably much less predominant than several others to which attention is drawn by numerous writers of the period. The licentiousness, the deism, the latitudinarianism, the popery, the puritanism, the erastianism of the age were unquestionably among the causes which contributed to the result, several of which are dwelt upon strongly, not only in divers anonymous pamphlets, but also by Dr. South in various sermons, one of which is expressly dedicated to the consideration of the unjust contempt into which the ministry had fallen. The Clergy themselves too did not, of course, entirely escape the general corruption of the period. More especially, the ill lives and conversations of many pluralists and their curates gave cause for scandal to the Church; although the conduct of the majority of the Clergy was probably exemplary. Difficult it undoubtedly is to form a decided opinion on all these points with satisfaction, because in the writers of the time there is some conflicting testimony.

To return however to Eachard. His whole book from beginning to end is a series of jocose caricatures.* He burlesques unmercifully the sermons of sundry injudicious and ignorant clergymen, and draws the most facetious picture of the extremities to which others were reduced by poverty: and he has done it in such a manner that he was perhaps

*The following specimen from one of his replies to an opponent, where he is not speaking of the Clergy, will give a notion of his style, and shew that he must not be always too implicitly believed:

"And to conclude this, sir, I cannot forget him, who having at some time or other been suddenly cured of a little headache with a rosemary posset, would scarce drink out of anything but rosemary cans, cut his meat with a rosemary knife, and pick his teeth with a rosemary sprig: nay, sir, he was so strangely taken up with the excellencies of rosemary, that he would needs have the bible cleared of all other herbs, and only rosemary to be inserted.". -Some Observations on the Answer to an Enquiry into the Grounds, &c. p. 88, Lond. 1685, (5th edition).

not very unnaturally supposed to have meant his descriptions. for the Clergy generally, and to have made up his book for the express purpose of bringing them into contempt.* So far from being a just picture of the Clergy of the time taken as a whole, it is in respect of their ignorance false, and in respect of their poverty much exaggerated, insomuch that he himself falls foul on his reviewers, and ridicules their stupidity for misunderstanding his meaning and applying his description generally to the Clergy which he intended only for a few or some. An instance or two of this jeering manner of reply will be found in our section on the Clergyman's library and attainments. So careless too was he whence the materials for producing his ludicrous effect were derived, that he scraped together some of the fooleries of the fanatical preachers of the day and charged them upon the Clergy of the Church. However (as we shall see anon) both Eachard and his opponents agree perfectly in several very material points respecting the extraction, the marriage, the attainments, and the intercourse of the Clergyman in society, in points in which Mr. Macaulay's description differs from them. The only charitable supposition therefore that can be made, is that Mr. Macaulay had read Eachard's original work carelessly, and was entirely ignorant of his reviewers and of Eachard's rejoinders.

The next witness on Mr. Macaulay's list is Oldham. Except that he somewhat generalizes certain observations of Eachard, and applies them to persons in a higher con

"The pretence of your book was to show the occasions; your book is become an occasion of the contempt of God's ministers."-Oley's Preface to Herbert's Country Parson.-The following is scarcely an unmerited sarcasm. "To close up all in a syllable, there is [in Eachard's Grounds, &c.] a pretty fardle of tales bundled together, and they have had the hap to fall into such hands as had rather lose a friend, not to say their country, than a jest."-Preface to a Vindication of the Clergy. Facit indignatio. Lond. 1672. Oley's Preface to Herbert's Country Parson.