OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1760. pretests that availed for the spilling of blood, in the contest
M^2. then raging between France and England. He inveighed
against the laws which meted out, in so much gold or silver,
the price of a wife's or daughter's honour. He ridiculed the
prevailing nostrums current in that age of quacks ; doubted
the graces of such betailing and bepowdering fashions, as
then made beauty hideous, and sent even lads cocked-
hatted and wigged to school; and had sense and courage
to avow his contempt for that prevailing cant of con-
noissieurship ("your Eaffaelles, Correggios, and Stuff")
at which Eeynolds shifted his trumpet. The abuses of
church patronage did not escape him; any more than the
tendency to " superstition and imposture " in the " bonzes
" and priests of all religions." He thought it a fit theme
for mirth, that holy men should be content to receive all
the money, and let others do all the good; and that pre-
ferment to the most sacred and exalted duties should wait
upon the whims of members of parliament, and the wants
of younger branches of the nobility.* The incapacities and
neglect thus engendered in the upper clergy, he also con-
nected with that disregard of the lower, which left a reverend
* I would refer the reader to George Selwyn's Correspondence if he •would desire
to study attentively one of the latest full-blown specimens of the breed of clergymen
engendered by this system, and introduce himself to by no means one of the
most objectionable of the smoking, reading, claret-drinking, toadying, gor-
mandising, good-humoured parsons of the time when Goldsmith lived and wrote.
He will find Doctor Warner quite an ornament to the Establishment throughout
that book, and only cursing, flinging, stamping, or gnashing, when anything goes
amiss with Selwyn. He will observe that the reverend doctor is ready to wager
Ms best cassock against a dozen of claret any day; and that tie holy man would
quote you even texts with the most pious of his cloth, "if our friend the Countess
" had not blasted them," In short, at whatever page he opens the Correspondence,
he will find parson Warner in the highest possible spirits, whether quizzing
" canting pot-bellied justices," contemplating with equanimity "a fine corpse at
" Surgeons' Hall," or looking forward with hopeful vivacity to the time when he shall
" be a fine grey-headed old jollocks of sixty-five." They who would hastily
accuse Fielding of exaggeration in his portraitures taken from the church, should first