I could heartily wish that more of our Country Clergy
would follow this Example; and instead of wasting
their Spirits in laborious Compositions of their own,
would endeavour after a handsome Elocution, and all
those other Talents that are proper to enforce what
has been penned by greater Masters. This would
not only be more easy to themselves, but more edifying
to the People.
[Footnote 1: Thomas Tyers in his ‘Historical
Essay on Mr. Addison’ (1783) first named Sir
John Pakington, of Westwood, Worcestershire, as the
original of Sir Roger de Coverley. But there is
no real parallel. Sir John, as Mr. W. H. Wills
has pointed out in his delightful annotated collection
of the Sir Roger de Coverley papers, was twice married,
a barrister, Recorder of the City of Worcester, and
M. P. for his native county, in every Parliament but
one, from his majority till his death.
The name of Roger of Coverley applied to a ‘contre-danse’
(i.e. a dance in which partners stand in opposite
rows) Anglicised Country-Dance, was ascribed to the
house of Calverley in Yorkshire, by an ingenious member
thereof, Ralph Thoresby, who has left a MS. account
of the family written in 1717. Mr. Thoresby has
it that Sir Roger of Calverley in the time of Richard
I had a harper who was the composer of this tune; his
evidence being, apparently, that persons of the name
of Harper had lands in the neighbourhood of Calverley.
Mr. W. Chappell, who repeats this statement in his
‘Popular Music of the Olden Time,’ says
that in a MS. of the beginning of the last century,
this tune is called ’Old Roger of Coverlay for
evermore. A Lancashire Hornpipe.’ In
the ‘Dancing Master’ of 1696. it is called
‘Roger of Coverly.’ Mr. Chappell quotes
also, in illustration of the familiar knowledge of
this tune and its name in Addison’s time, from
’the History of Robert Powell, the Puppet Showman
(1715),’ that
“upon the Preludis being ended,
each party fell to bawling and calling for particular
tunes. The hobnail’d fellows, whose breeches
and lungs seem’d to be of the same leather,
cried out for ’Cheshire Rounds, Roger of Coverly’,”
&c.]
[Footnote 2: I required]
[Footnote 3: that]
[Footnote 4: Archbishop Tillotson’s Sermons
appeared in 14 volumes, small 8vo, published at intervals;
the first in 1671; the second in 1678; the third in
1682; the fourth in 1694; and the others after his
death in that year. Robert Sanderson, who died
in 1663, was a friend of Laud and chaplain to Charles
I., who made him Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.
At the Restoration he was made Bishop of Lincoln.
His fame was high for piety and learning. The
best edition of his Sermons was the eighth, published
in 1687: Thirty-six Sermons, with Life by Izaak
Walton. Isaac Barrow, Theologian and Mathematician,
Cambridge Professor and Master of Trinity, died in
1677. His Works were edited by Archbishop Tillotson,
