Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/310

 We know the reading of this quaint man of God. He had some excellent works of divinity in weekly use—Jeremy Taylor, Joseph Hall, Tillotson, Bishop Berkeley—he had to have them in his business. He had also a tooth for all sorts of treatises on military and medical science, and he had manifest interest in the newly developing branch of obstetrics. But, in the long solitudes and silences of that pastoral study the authors most chewed and inwardly digested were meaty, racy fellows—Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Browne, Locke, Beroalde de Verville, Samuel Butler, Swift, Arbuthnot, Tom Brown and Voltaire.

The incongruity of his inner consciousness with his calling grew upon him till, as Gray suggested, he often must have ascended the pulpit, his fingers fairly itching with desire to throw his periwig in the face of his congregation. As an obvious result of his reading and his week-day way of life he was driven to a point of view at which he and his contemporaries, especially those in cassocks, appeared to him unutterably funny in their spiritual decadence, just as the Holy Catholic Church had appeared to Chaucer in the Middle Ages, just as all the churches appeared to Swift in the age of Anne. His humor was born in the stench of a moribund "Christianity."

Finally, in 1759, at the age of forty-six, on the occasion of a clerical wrangling under the shadow of the cathedral, his pent-up amusement burst forth in "A Political Romance," an allegorical skit in the manner of Swift's "Tale of a Tub," exhibiting himself and his clerical friends and enemies contending over an old "watch-coat," which "Trim" wants to take home "in order to have it converted into a warm under-petti-