[Footnote 680:  Bishop Wilson made vigorous and successful efforts in the Isle of Man to revive the system of catechising in church; and strongly urged every ’rector, vicar, and curate to spend, if but one hour in every week, in visiting his petty school, and see how the children are taught to read, to say their catechism and their prayers,’ &c.]

[Footnote 681:  Blackstone, though endowed with many excellent qualities, is said to have had a somewhat irritable temper, which, as he advanced in years, was rendered worse by a nervous affection.  Bentham says ’that he seems to have had something about him which rendered breaches with him not difficult.’  Lawyers are so accustomed to criticise arguments that they are apt to be somewhat severe judges of sermons.  How many clergymen of the present day would like to have their sermons judged by the standard of a great lawyer of a somewhat irritable temperament?]

[Footnote 682:  See vol. vii.  ‘Charge VII.’ in Paley’s Works in seven vols.]

[Footnote 683:  Similar complaints are uttered regarding 1737-8-9.  H. Walpole writes of 1751:  ’The vices of the lower people were increased to a degree of robbery and murder beyond example.’—­Memoirs of the Reign of King George II., vol. i. chap. ii. p. 44.]

[Footnote 684:  E.g. Archbishop Wake, in his letter to Courayer in 1726, writes:  ’Iniquity in practice, God knows, abounds, chiefly in the two extremes, the highest and the lowest.  The middle sort are serious and religious.’  See also Robinson Crusoe, chap. i.]

[Footnote 685:  Lord Hervey’s Memoirs, ii. 341, in reference to the Bill to put all players under the direction of the Lord Chamberlain.]

[Footnote 686:  See, inter alia, the description of a small squire of the reign of George II. in Grose’s Olio, 1792.]

[Footnote 687:  Quoted in Andrews, 18th century.]

[Footnote 688:  See chap. lxx. of Lord Mahon’s History.]

[Footnote 689:  Skeats’s History of the Free Churches of England p. 465.]

[Footnote 690:  Parliamentary History, vol. xiv. p. 1389.]

[Footnote 691:  In Bishop Fleetwood’s Charge at Ely, August 7, 1710, no less than three folio pages are filled with accounts of the abuse of the clergy, and the way in which the clergy should meet it.  Secker’s, Butler’s, and Horsley’s Charges all touch on the same subject.]

[Footnote 692:  See the conclusion of Burnet’s History of his Own Times.]

[Footnote 693:  Remarks on Collins’s Discourse on Freethinking, by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, xxiii.]

[Footnote 694:  Quoted in Mrs. Thomson’s Memoirs of Lady Sundon and the Court and Times of George II.]

[Footnote 695:  Smollett’s Continuation of Hume, v. 375.]

[Footnote 696:  Boswell’s Life.]

[Footnote 697:  Lord Mahon, chap. lxx.]