the expense of a gardener, or of a groom. Sometimes the
reverend man nailed up the apricots; and sometimes he curried the coach
horses. He cast up the farrier's bills. He walked ten miles with a
message or a parcel. He was permitted to dine with the family; but he
was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fill
himself with the corned beef and the carrots: but, as soon as the tarts
and cheesecakes made their appearance, he quitted his seat, and stood
aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great
part of which he had been excluded. [79]

Perhaps, after some years of service, he was presented to a living
sufficient to support him; but he often found it necessary to purchase
his preferment by a species of Simony, which furnished an inexhaustible
subject of pleasantry to three or four generations of scoffers. With his
cure he was expected to take a wife. The wife had ordinarily been in the
patron's service; and it was well if she was not suspected of standing
too high in the patron's favor. Indeed the nature of the matrimonial
connections which the clergymen of that age were in the habit of forming
is the most certain indication of the place which the order held in
the social system. An Oxonian, writing a few months after the death
of Charles the Second, complained bitterly, not only that the country
attorney and the country apothecary looked down with disdain on the
country clergyman but that one of the lessons most earnestly inculcated
on every girl of honourable family was to give no encouragement to a
lover in orders, and that, if any young lady forgot this precept, she
was almost as much disgraced as by an illicit amour. [80] Clarendon, who
assuredly bore no ill will to the priesthood, mentions it as a sign of
the confusion of ranks which the great rebellion had produced, that some
damsels of noble families had bestowed themselves on divines. [81] A
waiting woman was generally considered as the most suitable helpmate for
a parson. Queen Elizabeth, as head of the Church, had given what seemed
to be a formal sanction to this prejudice, by issuing special orders
that no clergyman should presume to espouse a servant girl, without
the consent of the master or mistress. [82] During several generations
accordingly the relation between divines and handmaidens was a theme
for endless jest; nor would it be easy to find, in the comedy of the
seventeenth century, a single instance of