as subject to so many humours and caprices.[1213] On the other hand, the principal Lecturers in London held a position which able men might well be ambitious of holding.  Nor was the long list of eminent men who had held London lectureships composed by any means exclusively of the leaders of one section of the English Church.  If it contained the names of Tillotson, and Burnet, and Fleetwood, and Blackhall, and Willis, and Hoadly, and Herring, it contained also those of Sharp and Atterbury, of Stanhope, Bennet, Moss, and Marshall.  The Lecture of St. Lawrence Jewry was conspicuously high in repute.  ’Though but moderately endowed in point of profit, it was long considered as the post of honour.  It had been possessed by a remarkable succession of the most able and celebrated preachers, of whom were the Archbishops Tillotson and Sharp; and it was usually attended by a variety of persons of the first note and eminence, particularly by numbers of the clergy, not only of the younger sort, but several also of long standing and established character.’[1214] On Friday evenings it was in fact described as being ’not so much a concourse of people, but a convocation of divines.’[1215] The suburbs, too, of London had their Lecturers, supported by voluntary contributions, ’the amount of which put to shame the scanty stipends of the curates.’[1216] At the end of the period the Lecturers kept their place, but in diminished numbers;[1217] their relative importance being the more dimmed by the increase in number of the parochial clergy, and by the migration from the old city churches to new ones in the suburbs and chapels of ease where no such foundations existed.

It is almost sad to note in Paterson’s ‘Pietas Londinensis’ the number of commemorative sermons founded in London parishes under the vain hope of perpetuating a name for ever.  At that time, however, ’all these lectures were constantly observed on their appointed days.’[1218] Funeral sermons had for some time been flourishing far too vigorously.  Bossuet and Massillon have left magnificent examples of the noble pulpit oratory to which such occasions may give rise.  But in England, funeral sermons were too often a reproach to the clergy who could preach them, and to the public opinion which encouraged them.  Just in the same way as a book could scarcely be published without a dedication which, it might be thought, would bring only ridicule upon the personage extravagantly belauded in it, so it was with these funeral sermons.  A good man like Kettlewell might well be ’scandalised with such fulsome panegyrics; it grieved him to the soul to see flattery taken sanctuary in the pulpit.’[1219] They had become an odious system, an ordinary funeral luxury, often handsomely paid for, which even the poor were ambitious to purchase.