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A SATIRE ADDRESSED TO A FRIEND.
The menial thing, perhaps, for a reward,
Is to some slender benefice preferred,
With this proviso bound, that he must wed
My lady's antiquated waiting maid,
In dressing only skilled, and marmalade.[1]
Let others, who such meannesses can brook,
Strike countenance to every great man's look;
Let those that have a mind, turn slaves to eat,
And live contented by another's plate;
I rate my freedom higher, nor will I
For food and raiment truck my liberty.
But, if I must to my last shifts be put,
To fill a bladder, and twelve yards of gut,
Rather with counterfeited wooden leg,
And my right arm tied up, I'll choose to beg;
I'll rather choose to starve at large, than be
The gaudiest vassal to dependency.
- ↑ This picture of the condition of the domestic chaplain is referred to by Mr. Macaulay as one of the authorities upon which he has founded a still more elaborate sketch of that class of the clergy. The case was sometimes even worse than it is represented by Oldham, who pensions off the young Levite, and marries him to an ’antiquated waiting-maid.' ’With his cure,' says Mr. Macaulay, 'he was expected to take a wife. The wife had ordinarily been in the patron's service; and it was well if she had not been suspected of standing too high in the patron's favour.'—Hist. of Eng., i. 328. Selden assigns a reason for the contumely with which the Protestant clergy were treated. 'Ministers with the Papists [that is their priests] have much respect; with the Puritans they have much, and that upon the same ground, they pretend both of 'em to come immediately from Christ; but with the Protestants they have very little, the reason whereof is, in the beginning of the Reformation they were glad to get such to take livings as they could procure by any invitations, things of pitiful condition. The nobility or gentry would not suffer their sons or kindred to meddle with the church, and therefore at this day, when they see a parson, they think him to be such a thing still, and there they will keep him, and use him accordingly.'—Table Talk. Ar. Minister Divine.
These young house-priests were very appropriately called ’trencher-chaplains,' and are frequently alluded to under that name by the writers of the seventeenth century. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, thus speaks of them, confirming the scandal referred to by Mr. Macaulay. 'If he be a trencher-chaplain in a gentleman's house, after some seven years' service he may perchance have a living to the halves, or some small rectory, with the mother of the maids at length, a poor
