to say their country, than a jest.' Anthony Wood, writing at the time of its appearance, classes it with 'the fooleries, playes, poems, and drolling books,' with which, as he bitterly complains, people were 'taken with' coupling with it Marvell's _Rehearsal Transposed_ and Butler's _Hudibras_.[4] To some of his opponents Eachard replied. Of his method of conducting controversy, in which it is clear that he perfectly revelled, I give a short specimen. It is from his letter to the author of _Hieragonisticon_:-- 'You may possibly think, sir, that I have read your book, but if you do you are most mistaken. For as long as I can get Tolambu's _History of Mustard_, Frederigo _Devastation of Pepper, The Dragon_, with cuts, Mandringo's _Pismires rebuffeted_ and _retro-confounded, Is qui me dubitat, or a flap against the Maggot of Heresie, Efflorescentina Flosculorum_, or a choice collection of F. (_sic_) Withers _Poems_ or the like, I do not intend to meddle with it. Alas, sir, I am as unlikely to read your book that I can't get down the title no more than a duck can swallow a yoked heifer'--and then follows an imitation of gulps straining at the divided syllables of Hieragonisticon. There is no reason to suspect the sincerity of Eachard, or to doubt that he was, in his own words, an honest and hearty wisher that 'the best of the clergy might for ever continue, as they are, rich and learned, and that the rest might be very useful and well esteemed in their profession.' To describe the work as 'a series of jocose caricatures--as Churchill Babington in his animadversions on Macaulay's _History_ does--is absurd. Eachard was evidently a man of strong common sense, of much shrewdness, a close observer, and one who had acquainted himself exactly and extensively with the subject which he treats. But he was a humorist, and, like Swift, sometimes gave the reins to his humour. It must be remembered that his remarks apply only to the inferior clergy, and there can be no doubt that since the Reformation they had, as a body, sunk very low. Chamberlayne had no motive for exaggeration, but the language he uses in describing them is stronger even than Eachard's. Swift had no motive for exaggeration, and yet his pictures of Corusodes and Eugenio in his _Essay on the Fates of Clergymen_, and what we gather from his _Project for the Advancement of Religion_, his _Letter to a Young Clergyman_, and what may be gathered generally from his writings, very exactly corroborate Eachard's account. The lighter literature of the later seventeenth and of the first half of the eighteenth century teems with proofs of the contempt to which their ignorance and poverty exposed them. To the testimonies of Oldham and Steele, and to the authorities quoted by Macaulay and Mr. Lecky, may be added innumerable passages from the _Observator_, from De Foe's _Review_, from Pepys,[5] from Baxter's _Life_ of himself, from Archbishop Sharp's _Life_, from Burnet, and many others.