ment, carried him safe through many difficulties, and he lived and died in a great station; while his competitor is too obscure for fame to tell us what became of him.

This species of discretion, which I so much celebrate and do most heartily recommend, has one advantage not yet mentioned: it will carry a man safe through all the malice and variety of parties so far, that, whatever faction happens to be uppermost, his claim is usually allowed for a share of what is going. And the thing seems to be highly reasonable; for in all great changes the prevailing side is usually so tempestuous that it wants the ballast of those whom the world calls moderate men, and I call men of discretion; whom people in power may, with little ceremony, load as heavy as they please, drive them through the hardest and deepest roads without danger of foundering or breaking their backs, and will be sure to find them neither resty nor vicious.

I will here give the reader a short history of two clergymen in England, the characters of each, and the progress of their fortunes in the world; by which the force of worldly discretion, and the bad consequences from the want of that virtue, will strongly appear :

Corusodes, an Oxford student and a farmer's son, was never absent from prayers or lecture, nor once out of his college after Tom had tolled. He spent every day ten hours in his closet, in reading his courses, dozing, clipping papers, or darning his stockings; which last he performed to admiration. He could be soberly drunk at the expense of others, with college ale, and at those seasons was always most devout. He wore the same gown five years without draggling or tearing. He never once looked into a play-book or a poem. He read Virgil and Ramus in the same cadence, but with a very differHe never understood a jest, or had the least conception

ent taste.

of wit.

For one saying he stands in renown to this day. Being with some other students over a pot of ale, one of the company said so many pleasant things, that the rest were much diverted, only Corusodes was silent and unmoved. When they parted, he called this merry companion aside, and said, "Sir, I perceive by your often speaking, and our friends laughing, that you spoke many jests; and you could not but observe my silence; but, sir, this is my humor: I never make a jest myself, nor ever laugh at another man's."

Corusodes, thus endowed, got into holy orders; having by the most extreme parsimony, saved 347. out of a very beggarly fellowship, he went up to London, where his sister was waiting-woman to

a lady, and so good a solicitor that by her means he was admitted to read prayers in the family twice a day, at 10s. a-month. He had now acquired a low, obsequious, awkward bow, and a talent of gross flattery both in and out of season; he would shake the butler by the hand; he taught the page his catechism, and was sometimes admitted to dine at the steward's table. In short, he got the good word of the whole family, and was recommended by my lady for chaplain to some other noble houses, by which his revenue (besides vales) amounted to about 307. a-year; his sister procured him a scarf from my lord, who had a small design of gallantry upon her; and by his lordship's solicitation he got a lectureship in town of 607. a-year; where he preached constantly in person, in a grave manner, with an audible voice, a style ecclesiastic, and the matter (such as it was) was suited to the intellectuals of his hearers. Some time after, a country living fell in my lord's disposal; and his lordship, who had now some encouragement given him of success in his amour, bestowed the living on Corusodes, who still kept his lectureship and residence in town; where he was a constant attendant at all meetings relating to charity, without ever contributing further than his frequent pious exhortations. If any woman of better fashion in the parish happened to be absent from church, they were sure of a visit from him in a day or two, to chide and to dine with them.

He had a select number of poor constantly attending at the streetdoor of his lodging, for whom he was a common solicitor to his former patroness, dropping in his own half-crown among the collections, and taking it out when he disposed of the money. At a person of quality's house, he would never sit down till he was thrice bid, and then upon the corner of the most distant chair. His whole demeanor was formal and starch, which adhered so close, that he could never shake it off in his highest promotion.

His lord was now in high employment at court, and attended by him with the most abject assiduity; and his sister being gone off with child to a private lodging, my lord continued his graces to Corusodes, got him to be a chaplain in ordinary, and in due time a parish in town, and a dignity in the church.

He paid his curates punctually, at the lowest salary, and partly out of the communion money; but gave them good advice in abundance. He married a citizen's widow, who taught him to put out small sums at ten per cent., and brought him acquainted with

jobbers in Change-alley. By her dexterity he sold the clerkship of his parish when it became vacant.

He kept a miserable house, but the blame was laid wholly upon madam; for the good doctor was always at his books, or visiting the sick, or doing other offices of charity and piety in his parish.

He treated all his inferiors of the clergy with a most sanctified pride; was rigorously and universally censorious upon all his brethren of the gown, on their first appearance in the world, or while they continued meanly preferred; but gave large allowance to the laity of high rank or great riches, using neither eyes nor cars for their faults: he was never sensible of the least corruption in courts, parliaments, or ministries, but made the most favorable constructions of all public proceedings; and power in whatever hands or whatever party, was always secure of his most charitable opinion. He had many wholesale maxims ready to excuse all miscarriages of state; men are but men, erunt vitia donec homines ; and quod supra nos, nil ad nos ; with several others of equal weight.

It would lengthen my paper beyond measure to trace out the whole system of his conduct; his dreadful apprehensions of popery; his great moderation towards dissenters of all denominations, with hearty wishes that, by yielding somewhat on both sides, there might be a general union among Protestants; his short, inoffensive sermons in his turns at court, and the matter exactly suited to the present juncture of prevailing opinions; the arts he used to obtain a mitre, by writing against Episcopacy; and the proofs he gave of his loyalty, by palliating or defending the murder of a martyred prince.

Endued with all these accomplishments, we leave him in the full career of success, mounting fast toward the top of the ladder ecclesiastical, which he has a fair probability to reach; without the merit of one single virtue, moderately stocked with the least valuable parts of erudition, utterly devoid of all taste, judgment or genius; and, in his grandeur, naturally choosing to haul up others after him whose accomplishments most resembled his own, except his beloved sons, nephews, or other kindred, be in competition; or, lastly, except his inclinations be diverted by those who have power to mortify or further advance him.

Eugenio set out from the same university and about the same time with Corusodes; he had the reputation of an arch lad at school, and was unfortunately possessed with a talent for poetry; on which account he received many chiding letters from his father and

grave advice from his tutor. He did not neglect his college learning, but his chief study was the authors of antiquity, with a perfect Z could never knowledge in the Greek and Roman tongues.

procure himself to be chosen fellow; for it was objected against him that he had written verses, and particularly some wherein he glanced at a certain reverend doctor famous for dulness; that he had been seen bowing to ladies as he met them in the street; and it was proved that once he had been found dancing in a private family with half a dozen of both sexes.

He was the younger son to a gentleman of good birth, but small estate; and his father dying, he was driven to London to seek his fortune; he got into orders, and became reader in a parish-church at 207. a-year; was carried by an Oxford friend to Will's coffeehouse, frequented in those days by men of wit, where in some time he had the bad luck to be distinguished. His scanty salary compelled him to run deeply in debt for a new gown and cassock, and now and then forced him to write some paper of wit or humor, or preach a sermon for 10s. to supply his necessities. He was a thousand times recommended by his poetical friends to great persons as a young man of excellent parts who deserved encouragement, and received a thousand promises; but his modesty, and a generous spirit, which disdained the slavery of continual application and attendance, always disappointed him, making room for vigilant dunces, who were sure to be never out of sight.

He had an excellent faculty in preaching, if he were not sometimes a little too refined, and apt to trust too much to his own way of thinking and reasoning.

When, upon the vacancy of a preferment, he was hardly drawn to attend upon some promising lord, he received the usual answer, "That he came too late, for it had been given to another the very day before." And he had only this comfort left, that everybody said, "It was a thousand pities something could not be done for poor Mr. Eugenio."

The remainder of his story will be despatched in a few words: wearied with weak hopes and weaker pursuits, he accepted a curacy in Derbyshire of 307. a-year, and when he was 45, had the great felicity to be preferred by a friend of his father's to a vicarage worth annually 607., in the most desert parts of Lincolnshire; where, his spirit quite sunk with those reflections that solitude and disappointments bring, he married a farmer's widow, and is still alive, utterly undistinguished and forgotten; only some of the neighbors have accidentally heard that he had been a notable man in his youth.

CONCERNING THAT UNIVERSAL HATRED

WHICH PREVAILS AGAINST THE CLERGY.

May 24, 1736. I HAVE been long considering and conjecturing what could be the causes of that great disgust of late against the clergy of both kingdoms, beyond what was ever known till that monster and tyrant Henry VIII., who took away from them, against law, reason, and justice at least two-thirds of their legal possessions; and whose successors (except queen Mary) went on with their rapine till the accession of king James I. That detestable tyrant Henry VIII., although he abolished the pope's power in England as universal bishop, yet what he did in that article, however just it were in itself, was the mere effect of his irregular appetite, to divorce himself from a wife he was weary of, for a younger and more beautifulwoman whom he afterwards beheaded. But, at the same time, he was an entire defender of all the popish doctrines, even those which were the most absurd. And while he put the people to death for denying him to be head of the church, he burned every offender against the doctrines of the Roman faith; and cut off the head of Sir Thomas More, a person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced, for not directly owning him to be head of the church. Among all the princes who ever reigned in the world, there was never so infernal a beast as Henry VIII., in every vice of the most odious kind, without any one appearance of virtue: but cruelty, lust, rapine, and atheism, were his peculiar talents. He rejected the power of the pope for no other reason than to give his full swing to commit sacrilege, in which no tyrant since Christianity became national did ever equal him by many degrees. The abbeys, endowed with lands by the mistaken notion of well-disposed men, were indeed too numerous and hurtful to the kingdom; and therefore the legislature might, after the Reformation, have justly applied them to some pious or public uses.

In a very few centuries after Christianity became national in most parts of Europe, although the church of Rome had already introduced many corruptions in religion; yet the piety of early Christians, as well as the new converts, was so great, and particu