in 1670.  This anonymity Eachard carefully preserved during the controversies which it occasioned.  It is difficult to understand how any one after reading the preface could have misunderstood the purpose of the book.  But Eachard’s fate was Swift’s fate afterwards, though there was more excuse for the High Church party missing the point of the Tale of a Tub than for the clergy generally missing that of Eachard’s plea for them.  Ridicule is always a dangerous ally, especially when directed against an institution or community, for men naturally identify themselves with the body of which they are members, and resent as individuals what reflects on them collectively.  When one of the opponents of Barnabus Oley in his preface to Herbert’s Country Parson observed:  ’The pretence of your book was to show the occasions, your book is become the occasion of the contempt of God’s ministers,’ he expressed what the majority of the clergy felt.  The storm burst at once, and the storm raged for months.  ‘I have had,’ wrote Eachard in one of his many rejoinders, ’as many several names as the Grand Seignior has titles of honour; for setting aside the vulgar and familiar ones of Rogue, Rascal, Dog, and Thief (which may be taken by way of endearment as well as out of prejudice and offence), as also those of more certain signification, as Malicious Rogue, Ill-Natured Rascal, Lay Dog, and Spiteful Thief.’  He had also, he said, been called Rebel, Traitor, Scot, Sadducee, and Socinian.  Among the most elaborate replies to his work were:  An Answer to a Letter of Enquiry into the Ground, etc.. 1671; A Vindication of the Clergy from the Contempt imposed upon them, By the author of the Grounds etc., 1672; Hieragonisticon, or Corah’s Doom, being an Answer to, etc., 1672; An Answer to two Letters of T.B., etc., 1673.  The occasional references to it in the theological literature of these times are indeed innumerable.  Many affected to treat him as a mere buffoon—­the concoctor, as one bitterly put it, of ’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.’  Anthony Wood, writing at the time of its appearance, classes it with ’the fooleries, playes, poems, and drolling books,’ with which, as he bitterly complains, people were ’taken with’ coupling with it Marvell’s Rehearsal Transposed and Butler’s Hudibras.[4]

To some of his opponents Eachard replied.  Of his method of conducting controversy, in which it is clear that he perfectly revelled, I give a short specimen.  It is from his letter to the author of Hieragonisticon:—­