’You may possibly think, sir, that I have read your book, but if you do you are most mistaken.  For as long as I can get Tolambu’s History of Mustard, Frederigo Devastation of Pepper, The Dragon, with cuts, Mandringo’s Pismires rebuffeted and retro-confounded, Is qui me dubitat, or a flap against the Maggot of Heresie, Efflorescentina Flosculorum, or a choice collection of F. (sic) Withers Poems or the like, I do not intend to meddle with it.  Alas, sir, I am as unlikely to read your book that I can’t get down the title no more than a duck can swallow a yoked heifer’—­and then follows an imitation of gulps straining at the divided syllables of Hieragonisticon.

There is no reason to suspect the sincerity of Eachard, or to doubt that he was, in his own words, an honest and hearty wisher that ’the best of the clergy might for ever continue, as they are, rich and learned, and that the rest might be very useful and well esteemed in their profession.’  To describe the work as ’a series of jocose caricatures—­as Churchill Babington in his animadversions on Macaulay’s History does—­is absurd.  Eachard was evidently a man of strong common sense, of much shrewdness, a close observer, and one who had acquainted himself exactly and extensively with the subject which he treats.  But he was a humorist, and, like Swift, sometimes gave the reins to his humour.  It must be remembered that his remarks apply only to the inferior clergy, 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.