ill for its abolition.

About the same time, Parliament ordered to be burnt by the
hangman a pamphlet against the Test, which one John Humphrey, an
aged Nonconformist minister, had written and circulated among the
members of Parliament.[154:1] There seems to be no record of the
pamphlet's name; and I only guess it may be a work entitled, _A
Draught for a National Church accommodation, whereby the subjects
of North and South Britain, however different in their judgments
concerning Episcopacy and Presbytery, may yet be united_ (1709).
For, to suggest union or compromise or reconciliation between
parties is generally to court persecution from both.

A book that was very famous in its day, on the opposite side to
Defoe, was Doctor Drake's _Memorial of the Church of England_,
published anonymously in 1705. The Tory author was indignant that
the House of Lords should have rejected the Bill against
Occasional Conformity, which would have made it impossible for
Dissenters to hold any office by conforming to the Test Act; he
complained of the knavish pains of the Dissenters to divide
Churchmen into High and Low; and he declared that the present
prospect of the Church was "very melancholy," and that of the
government "not much more comfortable." Long habit has rendered
us callous to the melancholy state of the Church and the
discomfort of governments; but in Queen Anne's time the croakers'
favourite cry was a serious offence. The Queen's Speech,
therefore, of October 27th, 1705, expressed strong resentment at
this representation of the Church in danger; both Houses, by
considerable majorities, voted the Church to be "in a most safe
and flourishing condition"; and a royal proclamation censured
both the book and its unknown author, a few months after it had
been presented by the Grand Jury of the City, and publicly burnt
by the hangman. It was more rationally and effectually dealt
with in Defoe's _High Church Legion, or the Memorial examined_;
but one is sometimes tempted to wish that the cry of the Church
in danger might be as summarily disposed of as it was in the
reign of Queen Anne, when to vote its safety was deemed
sufficient to insure it.

Drake's misfortunes as a writer were as conspicuous as his
abilities. Two years before the Memorial was burnt, his _Historia
Anglo-Scotica_, purporting to give an impartial history of the
events that occurred between England and Scotland from William
the Conqueror to Queen Elizabeth,