If Eachard had occasionally given the reins to humour, Macaulay had occasionally perhaps given them to rhetoric. But of the substantial accuracy of both there can be no doubt at all.
On the intelligent, discriminating friends of the Church, Eachard's work had something of the same effect, as Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage had in another sphere. It directed serious attention to what all thoughtful and right-feeling people must have felt to be a national scandal. It was an appeal to sentiment and reason on matters with respect to which, in this country at least, such appeals are seldom made in vain. It did not, indeed, lead immediately to practical reform, but it advanced the cause of reform by inspiring and bringing other initiators into the field. And pre-eminent among these was Swift. Swift was evidently well acquainted with Eachard's work. In the apology prefixed to the fourth edition of the Tale of a Tub in 1710, he speaks of Eachard with great respect. Contemptuously explaining that he has no intention of answering the attacks which had been made on the Tale, he observes: 'When Dr. Eachard wrote his book about the Contempt of the Clergy, numbers of these answerers immediately started up, whose memory, if he had not kept alive by his replies, it would now be utterly unknown that he were ever answered at all.' No one who is familiar with Swift's tracts on Church reform can doubt that he had read Eachard's work with minute attention, and was greatly influenced by it. In his Project for the Advancement of Religion, he largely attributed the scandalous immorality everywhere prevalent to the insufficiency of religious instruction, and to the low character of the clergy, the result mainly of their ignorance and poverty. His Letter to a Young Clergyman is little more than a didactic adaptation of that portion of Eachard's work which deals with the character and education of the clergy. The Essay on the Fates of Clergymen is another study from the Contempt, while the fragment of the tract which he had begun, Concerning that Universal Hatred which prevails against the Clergy, brings us still more closely to Eachard. The likeness between them cannot be traced further; they were both, it is true, humorists, but there is little in common between the austere and bitter, yet, at the same time, delicious flavour of the one, and the trenchant and graphic, but coarse and rollicking, humour of the other.
The essays reprinted from the Tatler give humorous expression to a grievance which not only wounded the pride of the clergy, but touched them on an equally sensitive part—the stomach. It was not usual for the chaplain in great houses to remain at table for the second course. When the sweets were brought in, he was expected to retire. As Macaulay puts it: 'He might fill himself with the corned beef and carrots; but as soon as the tarts and cheese-cakes made their appearance, he quitted his seat and stood aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great part of which he had been excluded.' Gay refers to this churlish custom in the second book of Trivia:—
'Cheese that the table's closing rites denies.
And bids me with th' unwilling chaplain rise.'
Possibly the custom originally arose, not from any wish to mark the social inferiority of the chaplain, but because his presence was a check on conversation. It must be owned, however, that this would have been more intelligible had he retired, not with the corned beef and carrots, but with the ladies. The passage quoted by Steele from Oldham is from his Satire, addressed to a Friend that is about to Leave the University and come Abroad in the World, not the only poem in which Oldham has thrown light on the degraded profession of the clergy. See the end of his Satire, spoken in the person of Spenser.
The last piece in this Miscellany has no connection with what precedes it, but it has an interest of its own. Among the many services of one of the purest and most indefatigable of philanthropists to his fellow-citizens was the establishment of what is commonly known as Poor Richard's Almanack. Of this periodical, and of the particular number of it which is here reprinted, Franklin gives the following account in his autobiography:—
'In 1732 I first published an Almanack, under the name of Richard Saunders; it was continued by me about twenty-five years, and commonly called Poor Richard's Almanack. I endeavoured to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand that I reaped considerable profit from it, vending annually near ten thousand. And observing that it was generally read (scarce any neighbourhood in the province being without it), I considered it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books. I therefore filled all the little spaces that occurred between the remarkable days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue, it being more difficult for a man in want to act always honestly, as, to use here one of these proverbs, "it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright." These proverbs, which contained the wisdom of many ages and nations, I assembled and formed into a connected discourse prefixed to the Almanack of 1757, as the harangue of a wise old man to the people attending an auction. The bringing all these scattered counsels thus into a focus enabled them to make a greater impression. The piece being universally approved, was copied in all the newspapers of the American Continent, reprinted in Britain on a large sheet of paper to be stuck up in houses; two translations were made of it in France, and great numbers bought by the clergy to distribute gratis among their poor parishioners and tenants. In Pennsylvania, as it discouraged useless expense in foreign superfluities, some thought it had its share of influence in producing that growing plenty of money which was observable for several years after its publication.'—Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin, Part II, Works Edit. 1833, vol. ii. pp. 146-148.
Reprinted innumerable times while Franklin was alive, this paper has, since his death, passed through seventy editions in English, fifty-six In French, eleven in German, and nine in Italian. It has been translated into nearly every language in Europe: into French, German, and Italian, as we have seen; into Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Bohemian, Dutch, Welsh, and modern Greek; it has also been translated into Chinese.[6] In the edition of Franklin's Works, printed in London in 1806, it appears under the title of The Way to Wealth, as clearly shown in the Preface to an old Pennsylvanian Almanack, entitled Poor Richard Improved, and under this title it was usually printed when detached from the Almanack.
As Franklin himself owns, the maxims have little pretension to originality. It is evident that he had laid under contribution such collections as Clerk's Adagio Latino-Anglica, Herbert's Jacula Prudentum, James Howell's collection of proverbs, David Fergtison's Scotch Proverbs (with the successively increasing editions between 1641 and 1706), Ray's famous Collection of English Proverbs, William Penn's Maxims, and the like. A few are probably original, and many have been re-minted and owe their form to him.
The first number of the famous Almanack from which they are extracted was published at the end of 1732, just after Franklin had set up as a printer and stationer for himself, its publication being announced in the Pennsylvania Gazette of December 9th, 1732; and for twenty-five years it continued regularly to appear, the last number being that for the year 1758, and having for preface the discourse which became so extraordinarily popular. The name assumed by Franklin was no doubt borrowed from that of Richard Saunders, a well-known astrologer of the seventeenth century, of whom there is a notice in the Dictionary of National Biography. But Mr. Leicester Ford[7] says that it was the name of 'a chyrurgeon' of the eighteenth century who for many years issued a popular almanac entitled _The Apollo Anglicanus__. Of this publication I know nothing, and can discover nothing. The probability is that its compiler, whoever he was, anticipated Franklin in assuming the name of John Saunders. He is most certainly not to be identified with Saunders the astrologer, who died in, or not much later than, 1687.