ypical
clergyman, as drawn, for instance, in Crabbe's poems and Miss Austen's
novels, is a well-bred, respectable, and kindly person, playing an
agreeable part in the 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