Leicestershire, Yorkshire, the great sporting counties. But the work now before us is not the only evidence we have that alongside of the more familiar type which greets us in Thomson, Goldsmith, Cowper, and others, there existed a class of men who carried into their country parsonages all the literary tastes they had acquired at the Universities, and if, as many would have called them, "little better than pagans," were at least cultivated, and refined, and intellectual pagans, who continued to be students through life from choice, not necessity, and who set an example in their respective spheres which was perhaps little less needed than one of more devotion and asceticism.

There were of course infinite varieties of country clergy. There were the men like Twining, who, without being of the "squarson" type, had no loftier conception of their spiritual duties than the Rev. Pitt Crawley, who belonged as much to the eighteenth century as the nineteenth, the only difference being that the one postponed them to field sports and the pleasures of the table, the other to books, music, and the fine arts. But these two classes were split again into numerous subdivisions. There was the fox-hunter, who was a good clergyman, and all the better able to counsel his parishioners in their troubles, and compose their quarrels, that he joined in their amusements, had a thorough knowledge of their characters, and was trusted by them in proportion. These men could not hunt every day, and the time that was not occupied in sport, instead of being devoted to Euripides, was given up to visiting their parishioners. They had a word for young and old, and were always welcome to the cottager's wife at that hour of the afternoon when she had made herself tidy, swept up the hearth, and was sitting down by the fire with the stockings of the family before her. He would chat with her about the news of the village, give her a friendly hint about her husband's absence from church, and perhaps before going would be taken out to look at the pig, on whose condition we may be sure he would have some valuable suggestions to bestow. The sermons which he preached at church would be robbed of none of their effect by the example of his own life, which, according to the standard of those days, would be blameless; and that there could be anything intrinsically wrong in his following the hounds, if it did not lead him to neglect other matters, it would never have entered into the heads of his parishioners to conceive. Vice and virtue were divided from each other in those days by very broad lines. If a man committed any of the sins enumerated in the Decalogue, he was a bad man; if not, he was a good one. There might. be a line of debateable land between obedience and disobedience in which the majority of mankind dwelt, and whom we were not to judge harshly, for were we not all "poor frail creatures"?-a reflection that on the whole was rather comforting to the ordinary mind. But unless a man was a thief or murderer, an open blasphemer, or notoriously covetous, unjust, or immoral, mere "worldliness" went for nothing in their eyes—no more in the case of a clergyman than in that of any other man. They

did not know what it meant. Then of course there was the country parson who was a bad clergyman, and brought the whole class into discredit-the man who was in the saddle four days a week, passed his evenings in drinking and card-playing, and left the dead who were interred during the week to wait for the burial-service till Sunday. Crabbe bears witness to this. But he shows, on the other hand, that among the country clergy even of that time there were those who did not fear to do their duty by rebuking the vices of the rich both privately and in the pulpit. And the present writer has often heard of a clergyman in the Eastern Counties who flourished circa Mr. Pitt, who must have been in some respects the counterpart of Crabbe's "stern old rector" in the Squire and the Priest. This remarkable man was in the habit of making very pointed references to an old naval officer who never missed church morning or afternoon, but whose union with the lady who sat at the head of his table had not been sanctified by the Church; upon which, so runs the story, an inquisitive old maid who occupied the adjoining pew invariably rose from her seat and peeped over the top of the partition at the white head of the delinquent just below. Among the more elegant and scholarly of the clergy, like our friend Twining, there were also numerous varieties. Cowper is equally severe upon both kinds,

The cassocked huntsman and the fiddling priest.

So we fear the curate of Fordham must have been included in his censures too. Cowper specially finds fault with concerts on Sunday afternoons, and to these we know that Twining was addicted, seeing no wrong in refreshing himself after the fatigues of the day with the strains of his "sweet Straduarius." The fiddling priest, however, was Cowper's special aversion, and there are some touches in his character of "Occiduus" so like Thomas Twining that one might fancy he had sat for the portrait. Fiddling seems to have been particularly fashionable about this period, and Cowper seems to have seen in it only one out of many traits by which the clergyman might be detected who aspired to be a man of fashion. There were many such in those days, though the breed is now entirely extinct. We see some traces of it in Miss Austen, who, in one of the best of her characters, Mr. Tilney, namely in Northanger Abbey, has given us a clergyman who attends watering-places, goes to balls and assemblies, dances, plays cards, and, in short, lives like other men of the world without the slightest idea that he is other than a model young man. Mr. Tilney, however, shows the character on its favourable side, but there were clergymen of the same genus, and who, to our minds, were far more unclerical and far less agreeable than the out-andout clerical squire who farmed his glebe, shot his partridges, and took his turn with the hounds like an honest man without in any way losing the respect and affection of his parishioners.

Another interesting illustration of the country clerical life may be

seen in the recently published autobiography of Sir Archibald Alison. His father was vicar of Kenley, in Shropshire, from 1792 to 1801. He was not, as far as we can make out, one of the sporting tribe; but he was a great naturalist, and took the Rev. Gilbert White as his model. "Botany, zoology, and ornithology" were his favourite pursuits, and he was one of the first to adopt the allotment system; that, at all events, is one boon for which the poor are largely indebted to the clergy of the eighteenth century. He lived in a quiet but hospitable style; was a man of letters and a scholar, and the author of a work which long enjoyed a high reputation-an essay, namely, on the Principles of Taste. Sir Archibald recalls but little of the theological or purely pastoral side of his father's life. But he was the idol of his parishioners, and when he left Kenley "was followed for several miles by the whole parish, most of whom were in tears.”

Clergymen of this description still survive in the Church of England. But they are, comparatively speaking, few and far between, and, where they still exist, are perhaps to some extent oppressed by the consciousness that their lives do not come up to the standard which modern theories exact. In fact, the kind of influence which they formerly exercised is not exactly the kind of influence which is now regarded with admiration. It was of the paternal and patriarchal character; and paternal and patriarchal principles are supposed to be obsolete. In days like our own, when "so many grave problems of humanity" are waiting for solution, and when the fundamental principles of Christianity are discussed in village newspapers, that simple conception of the clerical office which sufficed a bygone generation is no longer adequate to our wants; and the pleasant, genial old gentleman in knee-breeches, and sometimes top-boots, who fed his poultry and went into the stable to scratch the ears of his favourite cob, and round by the pigstyes to the kitchen-garden, where he took a turn for an hour or two with his spade or his pruningknife, or sauntered, with his hands in his pockets, in the direction of the cucumbers, and lifted up the frames to see how they were getting on; coming in to an early dinner, and going out again to visit the old women and the farmers' wives till tea time; then reading an old newspaper till supper, smoking his pipe, and going to bed at ten-is sadly behind the age, and is fast disappearing from view. Demands are now made upon the clergyman's intellect incompatible with this easy mode of life; but whether the people have gained by the change-a change which removes their clergyman so much further from themselves and their own occupations and amusements-is possibly open to doubt. But I fear I am verging on the political, and feel that I had better stop before I warm with the subject and write more than can be published.

Alewine.

THE earliest beginnings of our common life as Englishmen can hardly fail of a perennial interest for us. And to return to the fountain-head of English history, to the period when England was in the making, and to the study of one among these great and early Englishmen, is no unprofitable nor uncongenial task. Among the illustrious of that early period the name of Alcwine stands high. Coming, as he did, between the father of English learning, the venerable Bede, and Aelfred, the first great English king, his historical position makes him interesting from two points of view. He is the outcome of that earliest period of English intellectual development which was the work of Northumbria, before internal discords completed its ruin and compelled it to submit to Mercia under Offa. And he is an Englishman of an England whose political capital was not London but York, whose religious centre was Lindisfarne not Canterbury, whose fathers of the Church were Aidan and St. Cuthbert, not Theodore or St. Dunstan. Alcwine belongs to the Northumbrian epoch of English evolution. And it is important to bear this in mind, for his character and the colour of his imagination were essentially northern. But Alewine differs from the great scholar who preceded him and the great king who followed him in this. He is the first Englishman who directly affected the movement of the continent, and whose influence has remained a permanent factor in European history. Bede never left his convent of Jarrow, by the mouth of the Wear; Aelfred's days were employed in repelling the Danes and in making Wessex supreme in England. But the active period of Alcwine's life was passed chiefly in France. His fame is bound up with the court and the work of Charlemagne, or Karl, as we must call him. To that work he brought an English temper and a Northumbrian training. These are his spiritual pedigree; the conditions which formed the man, and gave to his life the colour which it wears. To understand that life we must

consider what this English temper and Northumbrian training meant. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of their parent-land in the formation of the English character. The grim and sombre plains, at that time unreclaimed, which border on the northern ocean; the hopeless grey sky, swept by a wrack of clouds scudding before the north; the illimitable monotony of the marshy levels; the "truculentia cæli," the "vis turbinum," which struck the Roman mind with such a terror, these were the characteristics of the Englishman's first home. On the shores of Northumbria, when conquest had led them thus far, they found

the same forbidding glance of Nature-the long stretches of down, grey beneath an east wind, the longer reaches of the grey ocean tumbling or rolling on the rocks of Farne, or on the sandy ridge that joins the holy island to the mainland. Such a stern dwelling-place could not fail to grave a gloomy imagination deep into the nature of this people. Their visionaries saw the blinding snow-drifts of Niflheim, the home of the hostile powers of Ice, falling in endless swirls, stifling and thick as wool. The fires of Muspel, the nether region of flame, are not yellow or orange with any natural heat, but black globes, for ever thrown up and for ever falling back into a bottomless pit. Alcwine paints among the terrors of hell the "frigoris immanitas," the "infinita miseriæ spatia," the endless halls of doom. All that the imagination conjures up is vast, dim, and undefined. If a limit be found, the fancy is ever ready to overfly the fact. The outlines of the vision are lost and confounded in the mists which hide the undiscovered horror beyond; just as the driving sea-fog shrouds and blurs the landscape that surrounded these men. How different from the imagination of a southern people; of the Italians Dante, Orcagna, or Angelico, dealing with almost identical fancies. With them all is dry, hard, and defined; as clear and perspicuous as the sunlight in which they daily lived.

Denied the brightness and the laughter of Nature, the human spirit in these northern men was rejected upon itself to find its sustenance. It sought its relief in intoxicating emotions; in the triumph of endurance and fervid determination, of teeth set and will resolved in the face of pain, failure, and death. And this temper ran through the whole fibre of the race. In contemplative natures the severity of discipline in which they sought their joy, this tightening of the spiritual muscles, fitted them admirably for accepting the sterner qualities of Christianity. The unknown end, the undefined reward, the injunction to look beyond, the endless conflict here, the victory achievable through endurance and denial alone, were components of a religious idea which these men might accept with passionate earnestness. The men of active temper, on the other hand, sought their sustenance in the fierce excitement of battle, in the grim delight of victory, the inebriation of blood and wounds and hacking steel. Odin, the war god, is their chief. Their battle-songs throb with the madness of fight. Each verse, in its violent spasm, shoots like a jet of blood thrust from the beating heart, and tingles to the very hands that clutch the sword. The rhythm is broken by the gasp and the sob of over-mastering sensations. This is a deep-rooted quality in the English, and lives all down our literature; in the border ballads, in Drayton's rollicking trooper's chaunt of victory for Agincourt; even in Burns it survives; and the battle fury, its delight and glory, find expression as he tells us how the Scottish went "red-wet-shod" through the carnage and the gore.

But whether this fierce and sombre temper of the English manifested itself in a life of contemplation or a life of action, its characteristic of