clergy as a body were far nearer in character to Trulliber than to Dr.
Primrose; coarse, sordid, neglectful of their duties, shamelessly
addicted to sinecurism and pluralities, fanatics in their Toryism and in
attachment to their corporate privileges, cold, rationalistic, and
almost heathen in their preachings, if they preached at all. The society
of the day is mirrored in the pictures of Hogarth in the works of
Fielding and Smollett; hard and heartless polish was the best of it; and
not a little of it was _Marriage a la Mode_. Chesterfield, with his
soulless culture, his court graces, and his fashionable immoralities,
was about the highest type of an English gentleman; but the Wilkeses,
Potters, and Sandwiches, whose mania for vice culminated in the
Hell-fire Club, were more numerous than the Chesterfields. Among the
country squires, for one Allworthy, or Sir Roger de Coverley, there were
many Westerns. Among the common people religion was almost extinct, and
assuredly no new morality or sentiment, such as Positivists now promise,
had taken its place. Sometimes the rustic thought for himself, and
scepticism took formal possession of his mind; but as we see from one of
Cowper's letters, it was a coarse scepticism which desired to be buried
with its hounds. Ignorance and brutality reigned in the cottage.
Drunkenness reigned in palace and cottage alike. Gambling,
cock-fighting, and bull-fighting were the amusements of the people.
Political life, which, if it had been pure and vigorous, might have made
up for the absence of spiritual influences, was corrupt from the top of
the scale to the bottom: its effect on national character is portrayed
in Hogarth's _Election_. That property had its duties as well as its
rights, nobody had yet ventured to say or think. The duty of a gentleman
towards his own class was to pay his debts of honor, and to fight a duel
whenever he was challenged by one of his own order; towards the lower
class his duty was none. Though the forms of government were elective,
and Cowper gives us a description of the candidate at election time
obsequiously soliciting votes, society was intensely aristocratic, and
each rank was divided from that below it by a sharp line which precluded
brotherhood or sympathy. Says the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady
Huntingdon, who had asked her to come and hear Whitefield, "I thank
your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers;
their doctrines are most re