Among men of science and of letters, Edmund Halley was exploring the starry heavens; and Sir Hans Sloane was revelling among the plants and flowers of earth. Nicholas Saunderson, blind from childhood, was lecturing upon optics; Roubiliac was making marble almost breathe, and Handel composing his immortal oratorios. Tindal was pouring out his streams of erudite infidelity. Daniel De Foe was still living. Bentley was at the zenith of his literary fame. Jonathan Swift was playing the part of a clever ecclesiastical buffoon. Edward Young was pondering poetry among the tombs of his own churchyard. Pope was employing his accomplished genius, surrounded by the beauties of his lovely retreat at Twickenham. Gay was composing comedies with more ability than ambition. Richardson, afterwards the novelist, was writing “indexes, prefaces, and honest dedications.” Savage was penning beautiful ideas amid tavern riots and cellar filth. Thomson, so lazy as to be a fit occupant for his own “Castle of Indolence,” was suffering his eye to roll in a fine frenzy among the beauties of the “Seasons;” and Samuel Johnson was preparing himself to be the Jupiter of letters, and to rule the literary world. Greatness unfortunately does not always give birth to goodness. “Never,” says a modern writer,[68] “has century risen on Christian England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Queen Anne, and which reached its misty noon beneath the second George—a dewless night succeeded by a sunless dawn. There was no freshness in the past, and no promise in the future. The Puritans were buried, and the Methodists were not born. The philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke, the moralist was Addison, the minstrel was Pope, and the preacher was Atterbury. The world had the idle, discontented look of the morning after some mad holiday, and, like rocket-sticks and the singed paper from last night’s squibs, the spent jokes of Charles and Rochester lay all about, and people yawned to look at them. The reign of buffoonery was past, but the reign of faith and earnestness had not commenced.” Let it not be said that this is modern imagination. Bishops are, or ought to be, sober minded men, and to one of these we refer the reader for a testimony concerning the moral and religious state of England during the period of which we are now writing. The Bishop of Lichfield, in 1724, in a sermon before the Society for the Reformation of Manners, said:—