MERCENARY PREACHER

In reply to a Query as to the meaning of this epithet in an obituary notice, quoted, in Vol. i, p. 384., your correspondent Arun suggests, in the same volume, p. 489., that it was most likely "used in its primary signification, and in the sense in which we still apply it to troops in the pay of a state, foreign to their own." I cannot help thinking, that by the designation *mercenary* was implied something more disreputable than that merely of "one who, having no settled cure, was at liberty to be 'hired;'" and in this I am borne out by Chaucer, no mean authority, who, in his well-known pictur…