Cf. also Parson Adams in ch. iii of _Joseph Andrews_, who has twenty-three; and Mr. Rivers, in the _Spiritual Quixote_, 1772:—‘I do not choose to go into orders to be a curate all my life-time, and work for about fifteen-pence a day, or twenty-five pounds a year’ (bk. vi, ch. xvii). Dr. Primrose’s stipend is thirty-five in the first instance, fifteen in the second (_Vicar of Wakefield_, chapters ii and iii). But Professor Hales (_Longer English Poems_, 1885, p. 351) supplies an exact parallel in the case of Churchill, who, he says, when a curate at Rainham, ‘prayed and starved on _ forty pounds a year_.’ The latter words are Churchill’s own, and sound like a quotation; but he was dead long before _The Deserted Village_ appeared in 1770. There is an interesting paper in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for November, 1763, on the miseries and hardships of the ‘inferior clergy.’ But of all kinds of ambition, etc. In the first edition of 1765, p. ii, this passage was as follows:—‘But of all kinds of ambition, as things are now circumstanced, perhaps that which pursues poetical fame, is the wildest. What from the encreased refinement of the times, from the diversity of judgments produced by opposing systems of criticism, and from the more prevalent divisions of opinion influenced by party, the strongest and happiest efforts can expect to please but in a very narrow circle. Though the poet were as sure of his aim as the imperial archer of antiquity, who boasted that he never missed the heart; yet would many of his shafts now fly at random, for the heart is too often in the wrong place.’ In the second edition it was curtailed; in the sixth it took its final form. they engross all that favour once shown to her. First version—‘They engross all favour to themselves.’ the elder’s birthright. Cunningham here aptly compares Dryden’s epistle _To Sir Godfrey Kneller_, II. 89–92:— Our arts are sisters, though not twins in birth; For hymns were sung in Eden’s happy earth: But oh, the painter muse, though last in place, Has seized the blessing first, like Jacob’s race. _Party_=faction. Cf. lines 31–2 on Edmund Burke in _ Retaliation_:— Who, born for the Universe, narrow’d his mind, And to _party_ gave up what was meant for mankind.