social life of his neighbourhood, and doing a secular work of solid value, but equally removed from the sacerdotal pretensions of the Caroline divines and from the awakening fervour of the Evangelical preachers.  The professors of a more spiritual or a more aggressive religion were at once disliked and despised.  Sydney Smith was never tired of poking fun at the “sanctified village of Clapham” and its “serious” inhabitants, at missionary effort and revivalist enthusiasm.  When Lady Louisa Lennox was engaged to a prominent Evangelical and Liberal—­Mr. Tighe of Woodstock—­her mother, the Duchess of Richmond, said, “Poor Louisa is going to make a shocking marriage—­a man called Tiggy, my dear, a Saint and a Radical.”  When Lord Melbourne had accidently found himself the unwilling hearer of a rousing Evangelical sermon about sin and its consequences, he exclaimed in much disgust as he left the church, “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life!”

Arthur Young tells us that a daughter of the first Lord Carrington said to a visitor, “My papa used to have prayers in his family, but none since he has been a Peer.”  A venerable Canon of Windsor, who was a younger son of a great family, told me that his old nurse, when she was putting him and his little brothers to bed, used to say, “If you’re very good little boys, and go to bed without giving trouble, you needn’t say your prayers to-night.”  When the late Lord Mount Temple was a youth, he wished to take Holy Orders; and the project so horrified his parents that, after holding a family council, they plunged him into fashionable society in the hope of distracting his mind from religion, and accomplished their end by making him join the Blues.

The quiet worldliness which characterized the English Church as a whole was unpleasantly varied here and there by instances of grave and monstrous scandal.  The system of Pluralities left isolated parishes in a condition of practical heathenism.  Even bare morality was not always observed.  In solitary places clerical drunkenness was common.  On Saturday afternoon the parson would return from the nearest town “market-merry.”  He consorted freely with the farmers, shared their habits, and spoke their language.  I have known a lady to whom a country clergyman said, pointing to the darkened windows where a corpse lay awaiting burial, “There’s a stiff ’un in that house.”  I have known a country gentleman in Shropshire who had seen his own vicar drop the chalice at the Holy Communion because he was too drunk to hold it.  I know a corner of Bedfordshire where, within the recollection of persons living thirty[8] years ago, three clerical neighbours used to meet for dinner at one another’s parsonages in turn.  One winter afternoon a corpse was brought for burial to the village church.  The vicar of the place came from his dinner so drunk that he could not read the service, although his sister supported him with one hand and held the lantern with the other.  He retired beaten, and both his guests made the same attempt with no better success.  So the corpse was left in the church, and the vicar buried it next day when he had recovered from his debauch.