We pass now from the literary pamphlets to the extract and excerpts illustrating the condition of the Church and the clergy at the end of the seventeenth and about the first half of the eighteenth century.  They are of particular interest, not only in themselves, but in their relation to Swift and Macaulay—­to Swift as a Church reformer, to Macaulay as a social historian.  Few historical questions in our own time provoked more controversy than the famous pages delineating the clergy who, according to Macaulay, were typical of their order about the time of the Restoration.  The first excerpt is from Chamberlayne’s Angliae Notitia.  The author of that work, Edward Chamberlayne, was born on the 13th of December 1616.  He was educated at Oxford, where he graduated as B.A. in April 1638.  For a short time he was Reader in Rhetoric to the University, but on the breaking out of the Civil War he left for the Continent, where he visited nearly every country in Europe.  At the Restoration he returned; and about 1675, after having been secretary to the Earl of Carlisle, he became tutor to the King’s natural son, Henry Fitzroy, afterwards Duke of Grafton, and subsequently instructor in English to Prince George of Denmark.  He was also one of the earliest Fellows of the Royal Society.  He died at Chelsea in May 1703.  In 1669 he published anonymously Angliae Notitia, or the Present State of England with Divers Reflection upon the Ancient State therefor, a work no doubt suggested by and apparently modelled on the well-known L’Estat Nouveau de la France.  The work contains more statistics than reflections, and is exactly what its title implies—­a succinct account of England, beginning with its name, its climate, its topography, and giving information, now invaluable, about everything included in its constitution and in its economy.  The extract printed here is, as is indicated, from pp. 383-389 and p. 401.  The work passed through two editions in the year of its appearance, the second bearing the author’s name, and at the time of Chamberlayne’s death it had, with successive amplifications, reached its twentieth edition.

Of a very different order to Chamberlayne’s work is the remarkable tract which follows.  The author, John Eachard, was born about 1636, at what date is doubtful, but he was admitted into Catherine Hall, Cambridge, in May 1653.  Becoming Fellow of the Hall in 1658, he was chosen, on the death of Dr. Lightfoot, Master.  His perfectly uneventful life closed on the 7th of July 1697.  Personally he was a facetious and agreeable man, and had the reputation of being rather a wit and humorist than a divine and scholar.  Baker complained of his inferiority as a preacher; and Swift, observing ’that men who are happy enough at ridicule are sometimes perfectly stupid upon grave subjects,’ gives Eachard as an instance. The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion enquired into, In a letter written to R.L., appeared anonymously