Among the preachers who are here commemorated will be found some of the most celebrated divines of the day;--Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, Dr. James Montague, Dr. John Buckeridge, Dr. John King, Dr. Parry, and Dr. George Abbot, none of them yet Bishops; Andrew Downes the Grecian; Dr. Thomas Holland, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford; Dr. Giles Thompson, afterwards Dean of Windsor; with two fervid orators, frowned upon by many of their brethren, but most influential with the people,--one of them Mr. Egerton, whose congregation assembled "in a little church or chapel up stairs" in Blackfriars, and the other Mr. Clapham, who was the incumbent of a church at Paul's Wharf. In notes, for the most part very skilfully taken,[14] of sermons of men so various in their acquirements, and many of them so eminently distinguished, we have examples of the pulpit oratory of the age, with evidences of the nature of the doctrines then generally prevalent in the Church of England, and of some of the qualities which tended to make the preaching of those doctrines popular. [Footnote 14: So skilfully that one is inclined to suspect that the business of note-taking may have been at that time one of the branches of legal education. A few occasional mistakes of course there are, and when extremely palpable we have sometimes not thought it worth while to notice them.] Nor is the book devoid of notices of many other circumstances which were characteristical of the time. The following are examples. At p. 22 we find an account of the operation of lithotomy, stated to be then first brought into medical practice; at p. 46 we learn that "a certain kind of compound called _Laudanum_" had been recently introduced as the chloroform, and at p. 132 that the game of shuttlecock was the croquet, of the day. In another place (p. 110) the fantastical and affectedly humble salutation to the knee alluded to by dramatists of the period is said to have been one of the many changes in fashion attributed to English travellers returned from Italy. At p. 36 there is a notice of an article apparently of fashionable costume which we are unable to explain, "Kentish tails." It is said of these things, whatever they were, that they "are now turned to such spectacles, so that if a man put them on his nose he shall have all the land he can see." What connection, if any, there may be between the tails here mentioned and the old legend of Kentish tails, we are obliged to leave to the consideration of persons versed in the antiquities of that county.[15] There are other passages which deal with the fashions of the day. It was a time in which ladies' dressing-rooms were nearly allied to apothecaries' shops, and the art of manufacturing female beauty seems to have fallen into the hands of probably a lower and irregular class of medical practitioners. The poets are full of allusions to this subject. Massinger sums it up in a passage which we may be excused for quoting:--