But in the last century the beneficed clergy were in a very different pecuniary condition from that which they at present enjoy. Till the Tithe Communication Act passed, the parson (unless he was a sharp man of business, shrewd and unscrupulous as a horse-jobber, and ready to have an unintermittent war with his parishioners) never received anything like what he was entitled to of the produce of the land. Often he did not get half his dues; and even when he did obtain a fair tithe, his receipts were small compared with what his successor in the present generation has from the same source. Agriculture was then in such a backward state, and land was so ill-cultivated, that the rector of a large parish of good land was justly entitled only to a sum that a modern rent-charge holder would regard with painful surprise if told that he might take nothing more for his share in the fruits of the earth. The beneficed clergy were a comparatively poor body. The curate perhaps was not in a worse state than he is in now, for the simple reason that a worse can hardly be. To add to the impoverished appearance of the clerical profession, there existed in every capital and country town the luckless nonconforming clergy, bereft of the emoluments of their vocation, and often reduced to a condition scarcely--if at all--removed from begging. The title of _Reverend_ was still affixed to their names--their costume was still that of their order--and by large masses of the people they were regarded with more reverence and affection than the well-fed Vicars of Bray, who, with mealy mouths and elastic consciences, saw only the butter on one side of their bread, and not the dirt on the other. Archbishop Sancroft died on his little farm in Suffolk, having for years subsisted on about fifty pounds a-year. When such was the fate of an Archbishop of Canterbury, the straits to which the ejected vicars or disabled curates were brought can be imagined--but scarcely described. In the great towns these unfortunate gentlemen swarmed, gaining a wretched subsistence as ushers in schools, tutors, secretaries--not unfrequently as domestic servants. In such a condition of the established church, the rule of never taking money from "the cloth" was almost invariably observed by the members of the medical profession. Mead once--and only once--departed from this rule. Mr. Robert Leake, a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, called on the doctor and sought his advice. The patient's ill-health had been in a great degree effected by doctoring himself--that is, exhibiting, according to his own notions of medical practice, some of Dr. Cheyne's prescriptions. "Do as I tell you," said Mead, "and I'll set you up again."