An English Garner: Critical Essays & Literary Fragments
History
An English Garner: Critical Essays & Literary Fragments
English literature -- History and criticism
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 reflections, and is exactly what
its title implies--a succinct account of England, beginning with its
name, its climate, its topography, and giving information, now
invaluable, about everything included in its constitution and in its
economy. The extract printed here is, as is indicated, from pp. 383-389
and p. 401. The work passed through two editions in the year of its
appearance, the second bearing the author's name, and at the time of
Chamberlayne's death it had, with successive amplifications, reached its
twentieth edition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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