were many survivors of the old breedmen born in the last century, who were ordained and settled down in country livings while Lord Liverpool was prime minister, and who, though many of them had the sense to see that the revival of 1833 was historically unassailable, never took to it kindly, and seemed redolent to the last of high pews, black gowns, bassoons, The cottagers in turn were equally glad fiddles, and parish clerks in top-boots. I to see him, for, except in cases of illness, myself, however, can recollect an older his conversation was of a secular characspecimen than even these-one who, ter; and as he was skilled in horticulture, born before the death of Chatham, lived and learned, as Dominie Sampson would to see the death of Palmerston, and car- have said, in that which appertaineth unto ried far down into the second half of the swine and poultry, he was able to give nineteenth century not only the habits and them useful hints on these subjects, and opinions, but even the costume, of the age sometimes left them wiser than he found of Pitt and Fox. He never had a pair of them -a result not always, perhaps, attrousers in his life; and though it was to tained by men of more spiritual zeal, who be gathered from his conversation that are fond of improving all occasions. Not he had some time in his dandy days but what, if either man or woman had figured in boots and buckskins, my own been long absent from church, without impression is that when I knew him he being able to assign a good reason for it, had never worn a boot for forty years. In he would administer a grave rebuke, all height he was about five feet eight; and the more telling from his habitual easy was always dressed in a very broad-skirted good-nature. It was seldom that these black tail-coat, coming well up into the visiting days did not result in one or more hollow of his head behind, a black single-plates making their appearance at the breasted waistcoat, black knee-breeches, parsonage dinner-table, to be filled with shoes, and gaiters. He wore no shirt collar, but a voluminous white neckerchief wound round his neck in soft thick folds, contrasting favorably with the tight cravats and high "stick-ups," which were then in vogue. On festive occasions he appeared, of course, in black silks and silver buckles; and I can recollect him when a young man of sixty-five or so wearing the tight black-silk pantaloons which are chiefly known to the present generation by the portrait of Sir Robert Peel. He played a very good rubber, and was a welcome guest at all the dinner-parties in the neighborhood, where he was treated with great respect, and in his later years regarded with much interest by those who met him for the first time. He was fond of society, and well qualified to shine in it, his natural gaiety and his old-fashioned politeness mingling together very happily. But much as he enjoyed himself abroad, it was in his own home, in his own village, and among his own people, that he sought and found the good of life. He knew no | pleasanter hours than those which he spent in a round of cottage visits, chatting with the mothers and grandmothers of the hamlet at their afternoon tea, observing traits of character, local idioms, and specimens of rustic humor, which it was his delight to retail in the evening to an appreciative circle at the parsonage. slices from the joint swimming in abundance of gravy, for some invalid parishioner whose case required good living. On a summer evening he delighted to stroll down his fields as far as the allotment grounds which he had provided for the laborers out of his small glebe, and inspect their crops or their tillage; and I can see him now in the hay-field with his hands in his pockets, and a benignant smile upon his countenance, as he exchanged jokes with the mowers or the rakers there were no machines then who might have had perhaps just a drop more beer than would have been altogether good for them at any other time than harvest, but who never forgot themselves, even under the influence of malt, in talking to the "parson," who, I don't suppose, ever heard a rude word uttered in his presence during the whole fifty-six years that he reigned over that little kingdom. He always dined with the village club at their annual feast, and watched with delight the rapid disappearance of the roast veal and batter puddings, which were con- | plice, and had service on saints' days, and sidered the prime dainties on such occa- restored his church, and while his strength sions. He did not disapprove of a moder- lasted did what he could. But neither he ate hilarity, though he retired before the nor his people ever took kindly to the new dancing began, only lingering long enough ways. on one occasion to hear, to his life-long amusement, a rustic gallant assure a young lady of his acquaintance that he "would kiss her if she wished it." At home he found occupation in farming the few acres of land which he kept in his own hands, in pruning his apricot and apple trees, in keeping in order the shady walks which he had formed in vari ous corners of his garden, in looking after the ducks, guinea-fowls, and turkeys which thronged his little farmyard, and in sometimes dragging the brook which ran through his meadows, and yielded good pike, eels, perch, and roach, which, as his sons grew up, were reserved for angling purposes. He was no sportsman, though very fond of natural history, and a student of the habits of birds, which built at their ease in the thick leafy covert which engirdled on every side his own snug, ivy-covered house. He knew the eggs and the nests of every common bird that flew, and was always well pleased if his children brought him specimens of the rarer kinds, or of such as only haunted the more distant fields and brooksides. In church with meek and unaffected grace His looks adorned the venerable place. His sermons were of the good old style, inculcating the reality of Christianity, illustrating the doubts which might be thrown upon it after the fashion of Archbishop Whately, and insisting on the congregation believing in it as they believed in the history of England; which, by the by, did not go much backwarder with most of them than "Bony" and the battle of Waterloo. He was a beautiful and most impressive reader, thoroughly simple and unaffected, but combining great earnestness with those natural powers of elocution which no art can teach; and which lent a charm to the liturgy and the lessons, especially if taken from the Old Testament, such as once experienced could never again be forgotten. But when he tried to go beyond this he did not succeed. The people did not come to church on the saints' days. "The band" took offence at the harmonium; and after all, I think the bad chanting of a village choir was a poor exchange for the quiet In this round of simple amusements our pathos with which the white-haired patricountry parson passed his years, quite arch in the twilight of a wintry afternoon unaware that for six days of the week any-used to repeat the nunc me dimittas. thing more could be required of him, or that the days were coming when zealots and bigots would When the summons came he was in his ninety-sixth year, and though it was long since he had mingled in general society, it was felt in the neighborhood that one of its landmarks had departed. "He was a ex-great man among his people," said the greatest English Churchman of our own day, "and we shall have no more such in the Church of England of the future." call his harmless life a crime, and the clergy would be summoned to change their sickles and their pruningknives for the weapons of spiritual warfare, and their quiet game of whist and their pleasant village gossip for the "serious problems of humanity," which, in the language of the new school, are “ everywhere calling for solution." That day indeed came even to this good old gentleman before he was called from his earthly home to a better one, where, let us hope, there are neither schools nor school boards, neither conscience clauses nor revised codes, and where payment for results having been made once for all, we shall, we trust, never hear of it again. But our country parson always strove to do his duty according to his lights, and when the new order began to reveal itself, he made a manful effort to respond to the appeal. This was hard work at eighty years of age. He preached in his sur But "the country parson as he was " comprehends many other varieties which have now however, for the most part, disappeared likewise. There was, of course, the hunting parson, as there is still, but who differed from the hunting parson of to-day as Adam before the fall differed from Adam after the fall. He hunted, and thought no ill; he knew not that it was wrong, or that anybody else knew it; whereas the parson who hunts' nowadays does it in more or less of a defiant spirit, as a protest against "narrowness - all denoting the more combative controversial stage into which we have now passed out of that peaceful Arcadia of mutual toleration. But I think the farming parson was a more decidedly special product of the old school than the sporting one; and who came out to dinner in pale-green kerthat very few clergymen are to be found seymere tights-a man of family, an nowadays who farm in earnest on a large accomplished dancer, and asked to all the scale, and look to their profits for a sub- great houses in the county. Some of stantial part of their income. There are Miss Austen's clergymen, though not in many parts of England, especially in guilty of such audacities of costume, bethe midland counties, livings with very longed, nevertheless, to the same type, and large glebes attached to them, running were doubtless considered excellent parfrom one hundred to six or seven hundred ish clergymen in their day. "How's your acres. The parson sometimes took the parson getting on?" said a country genwhole or a part of this into his own hands, tleman, who was somewhat of a humorist, and toiled as hard in his vocation as any to a very worthy cow-doctor who lived in born and bred agriculturist. He over- a neighboring village; "he's rather a looked his men in the fields, and occasion- queer sort, I understand." The parson ally took off his coat and helped them, in question was unhappily addicted to went to fairs and markets, bought and liquor, and what Johnson calls "the sold hard bargains, and was as good a lighter vices;" but the man was in arms 66 'e'er a farmer in the in a moment. judge of a beast as Queer, Sir Charles !" he country." I can remember such men, exclaimed; "he's a most respectable man, One such I saw what time the laboring ox barring his character!" Sir Charles told With loosened traces from the furrow came. this story to his dying day with increased enjoyment of it every time. It was clear He was a short, stout, plethoric man, with that in the man's eyes the parson was an legs set on rather behind him, as some institution. If his private character was men's are, like a cochin-china's; and bad, it was to be regretted; but it did not though active and robust, always rather affect his position if his public duties were waddled in his walk. One peculiarity respectably performed. | which I think, however, he shared in common with all the men of that leaven, was that he always wore his clerical dress in whatever work he was engaged; and he might be seen on a winter afternoon, just as the teams got back from some outlying field, "serving" the pigs, or bringing fodder on a pitchfork to the cattle in the farmyard, in a full suit of black not very much the worse for wear. Nobody thought ill of such a man for his mode of life; it detracted in no way from the article of his spirituality. He went everywhere like other clergymen; and his daughters, if he had any, would be refined and accomplished ladies. Odd as it may seem, there was nothing of the Trulliber about these men; and what is perhaps still odder, is the fact that, in the case of the one whom I have more particularly in my eye, his sermons were abstruse and casuistical, devoted to such distinctions of interpretation and niceties of theology as one certainly would not have expected from his ordinary conversation and appearance. Perhaps the one was necessary to neutralize the effect of the other; and the profound learning assumed in the pulpit on Sunday was intended to restore the balance, which had béen sadly weighed down during the remainder of the week on the side of turnips, tups, and oilcake. Then there were the clerical "bucks and diners-out, whom I recollect still earlier in my boyhood. The comic curate, Then there was the pleasant, middleaged, free and easy, very gentlemanly parson, who was not perhaps much of a sportsman, though he might fish or shoot a little now and then, but was eminently the man of society, told the best and newest stories, joked with the young ladies, talked like a London clubman to their fathers and their brothers, affected the character of a thorough "man of the world," and dressed as little like a clergyman as he could. Before the rural conscience was awakened from its long sleep, such men were great favorites in society. They were often men of some little culture, fair scholars, and generally well informed. But they agreed with all the other varieties I have mentioned in the one common characteristic, that they did not consider their profession to entail on them of necessity anything in the shape of a distinctly non-secular character. They were part of the county society, belonging to a profession requiring the performance of duties more than ordinarily grave and serious, but when these were done not demanding of them any very different life from that of their neighbors. They were part of a great system, and that carried it off. Of course it is not meant that this conception was universal. Evangelicalism, in fact, was a standing protest against it. But Evangelicalism abode chiefly in the towns, and never laid any hold of the country people, whose minds are not the kind of soil in which emotional religion takes root. For | escaped all violent disturbance. But we all that Evangelicalism could have done could not escape altogether. Privilege in the majority of English villages, the became unpopular. The Dissenters gathcountry parson as he was might have gone ered strength and purpose. The repeal on playing his rubber, farming his glebe, of the Test and Corporation Acts-and feeding his pigs, shooting his partridges, more, far more, the repeal of Roman and taking an active part in country busi- Catholic disabilities; the Reform Bill, and ness to the day of judgment.. the legislation which followed it; the new Poor Law and the Municipal Corporation acts, -effected in the course of seven years a complete change in the position of the country parson, though its full effects were of course not recognized at once, and men of the old school went on as before, and the existing generation continued to think of them as before, long after the ancient régime had received its mortal wound. But this was not all. The old-fashioned parson and the oldfashioned peasant were thoroughly in harmony with each other. They looked upon Dissenters as Cobbett looked upon them. Many of them saw no harm in going "to chapel" on Sunday evening if they had been to church in the morning; and the parson saw little harm in it either. The leading Dissenter in the village. a cantankerous man, too— used to say of the first old gentleman I have described that There were men in the Church of Enhe was a true Christian." A shoemaker gland at that time who clearly understood in the same parish, of a figurative turn of what had happened between 1828 and mind, declared that there was "such a 1833, and what was likely to follow, if mess o' wickedness in the world that men something was not done. At that time, wanted more than one hoss to pull them says Cardinal Newman, "I hated Liberthrough it." Now and then the Dissenters, alism." The triumph of Liberalism was under the old régime, would be supposed to him like the triumph of Antichrist. to forget themselves, and carry their heads And he and his friends set to work to arm a little too high, as when they asked the the Church of England at all events for parish clerk to tea a liberty which he the coming struggle, and to find her a new, indignantly resented. But, on the whole, and, as they hoped, a stronger position the religious life of the village in those instead of the one which she had lost, or good old days Πρῖν ἐλθεῖν μιας 'Αχαίων glided was about to lose. It is no part of the smoothly along. The parson was ac-design of this paper to discuss either the cepted as part of the constitution -a progress, the character, or the wisdom of country gentleman, a magistrate charged the great Oxford revival. I believe it with civil as well as with religious functions, and sharing with the squire the duty of keeping order within a given district. As long as this conception lasted, so long was his position impregnable. The Nonconformist theory did not seriously affect | it indeed, scarcely touched it. The two did not meet upon the same ground. It was impossible that the work of the clergy as understood at that time could have been performed by any voluntary society. But in proportion as the clergy have lost their blended character, and come to rely more exclusively on their theological title to obedience, so far have they quitted their vantage-ground, and descended to an arena where Dissent can meet them upon something like equal terms. That they have gained much in exchange for what they have lost I should be the last to deny. But of that hereafter. The old system-wore itself out at last. Thanks to the vigor and patriotism of the English aristocracy, the revolutionary elements which existed in England, as they must exist in all old countries, did not catch fire from the French; and we was, from a Churchman's point of view, a Pac of story sort The movement has had great success in reclaiming the masses of the working population, but it weakened the position of the country parson. The farmers and small tradesmen were almost to a man against it; and of course when the parson laid claim to higher spiritual prerogatives, his personal qualifications and his daily life and conversation were subjected to closer scrutiny. What the tracts had done to loosen the relation between the parson and the farmer, the new poor law did to loosen the relation between the parson and the peasantry. Of this I feel more sure than of anything else which I have said in this article. I am old enough to remember as a child the way in which the laborers talked of the "Bastile." The substitution of a Union Board of Guardians for the ancient parochial organization severed the old bond between the laborers and the landowners, whether lay or clerical, and, together with the new ritual, has been one of the chief instruments of change in the position of the country clergy. of thing the middle classes were as inno- | an average agricultural village of the prescent as Mr. Cassilis himself. ent day, and compare it with what we can remember thirty years ago, shall we find that marked improvement in the manners and morals of the people which would be the best proof of the assertion? The moral influence of the Church of England, as a divine institution which was part also of the law of the land, and had the same claim on your obedience as the sovereign, the magistrate, and the Houses of Parliament, was quite equal, I think, to the effect which is produced by the increased individual activity of the parochial clergy. However this may be, that is certainly the distinction between the two epochs. The modern country parson is not always, for there is not the same homogeneity about the class as formerly, but, generally speaking- always "on the go." He has penny readings, harvest-home festivals with a church service, lectures, entertainments without number. He strives most earnestly and laboriously to identify himself with the amusements of the people, as well as with their more serious concerns, and to show them that the Church is everywhere, and has as much sympathy with the joyous humanities of our nature as with its spiritual wants and troubles. All this is excellent. Only under the old régime it was taken for granted. Now the parson's life is one long effort. He is always to be seen in his long singlebreasted coat and slouched billycock hat, hurrying at a half-run from one end of the village to the other, intent upon some new scheme for what is called "interesting the people." In a healthier state of things they did not stand in need of being interested. The laissez faire principle is altogether banished from among the modern country clergy; and the difference between old and new is specially emphasized in their attitude towards Dissenters. The country parson, as he is, presents as many varieties to the eye of the philosopher as his less active but more comfortable predecessor. There are among them, of course, "survivals," anachronisms, who, if they had lived sixty years ago, would have been more in their place. But these are few and far between. There are, as I have said, sporting parsons now as ever; but the parson who hunts nowadays, in the spirit of muscular Christianity who hunts as Kingsley hunted, not only because he likes it, but to show that a clergyman has as good a right to hunt as any other man, and as a protest against asceticism, sacerdotalism, and modern exaltation of the hierarchic hoos, in general-is wide asunder as the poles from the sporting parson of yore, innocent of all moral purpose, and hunting if he liked it, just as he got up or went to bed without its even entering into his head that there could be two opinions on the subject. But the great point which the body of English country clergy of to-day seem to possess in common is that they feel less strongly than they did that they are part of our great national system, and more than they did that their position in the country depends exclusively on their personal efficiency. At first sight perhaps everybody might be inclined to cry out, And so much the better! But this I take leave to doubt. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and if we take The country parson as he was, looked on them simply as one of the minor troubles of life, of which, as no one could hope altogether to escape them, it behoved a sensible man to make the best. His way was to take no notice of them; to assume that they were all Churchmen, as by law they were, and to visit them and talk to them just exactly as he would have done to any other of his parishioners. This, I am afraid, the country parson of to-day finds to be almost impossible. The parson who was not only the clergyman but a good deal more besides could do this; in remote parts of England, where Dis. senters who never enter the church door and |