Queen Caroline made of Butler’s ‘Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature’ a sort of light-reading book, which was the ordinary companion of her breakfast-table. Caroline may have liked to dip into such profound fountains; but I doubt whether she often looked into the ‘Analogy,’ as it was not published till 1736, when her malady was increasing, and her power to study a work so abstruse must have been much diminished. Still she admired the learned divine, who was the son of a Wantage shopkeeper, and who was originally a Presbyterian Dissenter--a community for which German Protestant princes and princesses have always entertained a considerable regard. Caroline did not merely admire Butler because high churchmen looked upon him, even after his ordination, as half a dissenter; she had admired his Rolls Sermons, and when Secker, another ex-Presbyterian whom Butler had induced to enter the church, introduced and recommended him to Queen Caroline, she immediately appointed him clerk of the closet. It could have been very little before this, that Secker himself--who had been a Presbyterian, a doctor, a sort of sentimental vagabond on the Continent, and a free-thinker to boot--had been, after due probation and regular progress, appointed rector of St. James’s. Walpole declares that Secker owed this preferment to the favour of the Queen, and Secker’s biographers cannot prove much to the contrary. At the period of Caroline’s death he was Bishop of Bristol, and that high dignity he is also said to have owed to the friendship of Caroline. I wish it were only as true, that when the Prince of Wales was at enmity with the King and Queen, and used to attend St. James’s Church, his place of residence being at Norfolk House, in the adjacent square--I wish, I say, it were true that Secker once preached to the prince on the text, ‘Honour thy father and mother.’ The tale, however, is apocryphal; but it _is_ true that the prince himself, at the period of the family quarrel, was startled, on entering the church, at hearing Mr. Bonny, the clerk in orders, rather pointedly beginning the service with, ‘I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned,’ &c.