Old Jewry, saw Mr.
Shower, and recognised him as the preacher of her dream. The lady
afterwards told this to Mr. Rogers' son, when the lad turned Dissenter.
Like many other of the early Nonconformist preachers, Rogers seems to
have been a hypochondriac, who looked upon himself as "a broken vessel,
a dead man out of mind," and eventually gave up his profession. Shower's
successor, Simon Browne, wrote a volume of "Hymns," compiled a lexicon,
and wrote a "Defence of the Christian Revelation," in reply to Woolston
and other Freethinkers. Browne was also a victim to delusions, believing
that God, in his displeasure, had withdrawn his soul from his body. This
state of mind is said by some to have arisen from a nervous shock Browne
had once received in finding a highwayman with whom he had grappled dead
in his grasp. He believed his mind entirely gone, and his head to
resemble a parrot's. At times his thoughts turned to self-destruction.
He therefore abandoned his pulpit, and retired to Shepton Mallet to
study. His "Defence" is dedicated to Queen Caroline as from "a thing."

Samuel Chandler, a celebrated author and divine, and a friend of Butler
and Seeker, and Bowyer the printer, was for forty years another Old
Jewry worthy. He lectured against Popery with great success at Salters'
Hall, and held a public dispute with a Romish priest at the "Pope's
Head," Cornhill. In a funeral sermon on George II., Chandler drew absurd
parallels between him and David, which the Grub Street writers made the
most of. Chandler's deformed sister Mary, a milliner at Bath, wrote
verses which Pope commended.

In 1744 Richard Price, afterwards chaplain at Stoke Newington, held the
lectureship at the Old Jewry. Price's lecture on "Civil Liberty,"
_apropos_ of the American war, gained him Franklin's and Priestley's
friendship; as his first ethical work had already won Hume's. Burke
denounced him as a traitor; while the Corporation of London presented
him with the freedom of the City in a gold box, the Congress offered him
posts of honour, and the Premier of 1782 would have been glad to have
had him as a secretary. The last pastor at the Old Jewry Chapel was
Abraham Rees. This indefatigable man enlarged Harris's "Lexicon
Technicum," improved by Ephraim Chambers, into the "Encyclopaedia" of
forty-five quarto volumes, a book now thought redundant and
ill-arranged, and the philological parts defective. In 1808 the Old
Jewry congregation removed to Jewin