by Bishop Hoadly, who, in a sermon preached before the king (1717), took a latitudinarian view of episcopal authority, and objected to the entire system of the High Church party. Queen Caroline, whose keen intellect was allied to a coarseness which makes her a representative of the age, was considerably attracted by theological discussion. She obtained a bishopric for Berkeley, recommended Walpole to read Butler's _Analogy_, which was at one time her daily companion at the breakfast-table, and made the preferment of its author one of her last requests to the king. She liked well to reason with Dr. Samuel Clarke, 'of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate,' and wished to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, but was told that he was not sufficiently orthodox. Theology was not disregarded under the first and second Georges; it was only religion that had fallen into disrepute. The law itself was calculated to excite contempt for the most solemn of religious services. 'I was early,' Swift writes to Stella, 'with the Secretary (Bolingbroke), but he was gone to his devotions and to receive the sacrament. Several rakes did the same. It was not for piety, but for employment, according to Act of Parliament.' A glance at some additional features in the social condition of the age will enable us to understand better the character of its literature. III. It is a platitude to say that authors are as much affected as other men by the atmosphere which they breathe. Now and then a consummate man of genius seems to stand so much above his age as for all high purposes of art to be untouched by it. Like Milton as a poet, though not as a prose writer, his 'soul is like a star and dwells apart;' but in general, imaginative writers, are intensely affected by the society from which they draw many of their intellectual resources. In the so-called 'Augustan age'[3] this influence would have been felt more strongly than in ours, since the range of men of letters was generally restricted to what was called the Town. They wrote for the critics in the coffee-houses, for the noblemen from whom they expected patronage, and for the political party they were pledged to support.