garded as a gentleman, because he could not dare to aspire
to the hand of one of the young ladies at the manor house, because he
was not asked into the parlours of the great, but was left to drink and
smoke with grooms and butlers, that the power of the clerical body
was smaller than at present. The influence of a class is by no means
proportioned to the consideration which the members of that class
enjoy in their individual capacity. A Cardinal is a much more exalted
personage than a begging friar: but it would be a grievous mistake to
suppose that the College of Cardinals has exercised greater dominion
over the public mind of Europe than the Order of Saint Francis. In
Ireland, at present, a peer holds a far higher station in society than
a Roman Catholic priest: yet there are in Munster and Connaught few
counties where a combination of priests would not carry an election
against a combination of peers. In the seventeenth century the pulpit
was to a large portion of the population what the periodical press now
is. Scarce any of the clowns who came to the parish church ever saw a
Gazette or a political pamphlet. Ill informed as their spiritual pastor
might be, he was yet better informed than themselves: he had every
week an opportunity of haranguing them; and his harangues were never
answered. At every important conjuncture, invectives against the Whigs
and exhortations to obey the Lord's anointed resounded at once from many
thousands of pulpits; and the effect was formidable indeed. Of all the
causes which, after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, produced
the violent reaction against the Exclusionists, the most potent seems to
have been the oratory of the country clergy.

The power which the country gentleman and the country clergyman
exercised in the rural districts was in some measure counterbalanced by
the power of the yeomanry, an eminently manly and truehearted race. The
petty proprietors who cultivated their own fields with their own hands,
and enjoyed a modest competence, without affecting to have scutcheons
and crests, or aspiring to sit on the bench of justice, then formed a
much more important part of the nation than at present. If we may trust
the best statistical writers of that age, not less than a hundred and
sixty thousand proprietors, who with their families must have made up
more than a seventh of the whole population, derived their subsistence
from little freehold estates. The average income of