eele; what he knew of
books and learning had been almost entirely derived from Addison's
conversation; what moral virtue he had, from Addison's influence. And he
had repaid this with an admiration and affection which bordered on
idolatry. A more generous and genial, a more kindly, a more warm-hearted
man than Steele never lived, and it is easy to conceive what his feelings
must have been when he found his friend estranged from him and a rival in
his place. There is much to excuse what this letter to Congreve plainly
betrays; but excuse is not justification. Tickell had a delicate and
difficult task to perform: a duty to his dead friend, which was
paramount, a duty to Steele, and a duty to himself, and he succeeded in
performing each with admirable tact. Whether Tickell ever made any reply
to Steele's strictures, I have not been able to discover.

We pass now from the literary pamphlets to the extract and excerpts
illustrating the condition of the Church and the clergy at the end of the
seventeenth and about the first half of the eighteenth century. They are
of particular interest, not only in themselves, but in their relation to
Swift and Macaulay--to Swift as a Church reformer, to Macaulay as a
social historian. Few historical questions in our own time provoked more
controversy than the famous pages delineating the clergy who, according
to Macaulay, were typical of their order about the time of the
Restoration. The first excerpt is from Chamberlayne's _Angliae Notitia_.
The author of that work, Edward Chamberlayne, was born on the 13th of
December 1616. He was educated at Oxford, where he graduated as B.A. in
April 1638. For a short time he was Reader in Rhetoric to the University,
but on the breaking out of the Civil War he left for the Continent, where
he visited nearly every country in Europe. At the Restoration he
returned; and about 1675, after having been secretary to the Earl of
Carlisle, he became tutor to the King's natural son, Henry Fitzroy,
afterwards Duke of Grafton, and subsequently instructor in English to
Prince George of Denmark. He was also one of the earliest Fellows of the
Royal Society. He died at Chelsea in May 1703. In 1669 he published
anonymously _Angliae Notitia, or the Present State of England with Divers
Reflection upon the Ancient State therefor_, a work no doubt suggested by
and apparently modelled on the well-known _L'Estat Nouveau de la France_.
The work contains more statistics than refl