and there can be no doubt that since the Reformation they had, as a body, sunk very low. Chamberlayne had no motive for exaggeration, but the language he uses in describing them is stronger even than Eachard's. Swift had no motive for exaggeration, and yet his pictures of Corusodes and Eugenio in his _Essay on the Fates of Clergymen_, and what we gather from his _Project for the Advancement of Religion_, his _Letter to a Young Clergyman_, and what may be gathered generally from his writings, very exactly corroborate Eachard's account. The lighter literature of the later seventeenth and of the first half of the eighteenth century teems with proofs of the contempt to which their ignorance and poverty exposed them. To the testimonies of Oldham and Steele, and to the authorities quoted by Macaulay and Mr. Lecky, may be added innumerable passages from the _Observator_, from De Foe's _Review_, from Pepys,[5] from Baxter's _Life_ of himself, from Archbishop Sharp's _Life_, from Burnet, and many others. It is remarkable that Eachard says nothing about two causes which undoubtedly contributed to degrade the Church in the eyes of the laity: its close association with party politics, and the spread of latitudinarianism, a conspicuous epoch in which was marked some twenty-six years later in the Bangorian controversy. The appearance of the first volume of Macaulay's _History_ in 1848 again brought Eachard's work into prominence. Macaulay's famous description of the clergy of the seventeenth century in his third chapter was based mainly on Eachard's account. The clergy and orthodox laity of our own day were as angry with Eachard's interpreter as their predecessors, nearly two centuries before, had been with Eachard himself. The controversy began seriously, after some preliminary skirmishing in the newspapers and lighter reviews, with Mr. Churchill Babington's _Mr. Macaulay's Characters of the Clergy in the Latter Part of the Seventeenth Century Considered_, published shortly after the appearance of the _History_. What Mr. Babington and those whom he represented forgot was precisely what Eachard's opponents had forgotten, that it was not the clergy universally who had been described, for Macaulay, like Eachard, had distinguished, but the clergy as represented by its proletariat. If Eachard had occasionally given the reins to humour, Macaulay had occasionally perhaps given them to rhetoric. But of the substantial accuracy of both there can be no doubt at all. On the intelligent, discriminating friends of the Church, Eachard's work had something of the same effect, as Jeremy Collier's _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage_ had in another sphere. It directed serious attention to what all thoughtful and right-feeling people must have felt to be a national scandal. It was an appeal to sentiment and reason on matters with respect to which, in this country at least, such appeals are seldom made in vain. It did not, indeed, lead immediately to practical reform, but it advanced the cause of reform by inspiring and bringing other initiators into the field. And pre-eminent among these was Swift. Swift was evidently well acquainted with Eachard's