He therefore, overwhelmed by the distractions of his official station, rightly perhaps conceived himself to have fulfilled his engagements as a guardian, if he stood ready to come forward upon any difficulty arising, but else in ordinary cases devolved his functions upon those who enjoyed more leisure. In that category stood, beyond a doubt, a third of our guardians, the Rev. Samuel H., who was at the time of my father's death a curate at some church (I believe) in Manchester or in Salford.12 This gentleman represented a class – large enough at all times by necessity of human nature, but in those days far larger than at present – that class, I mean, who sympathise with no spiritual sense or spiritual capacities in man; who understand by religion simply a respectable code of ethics – leaning for support upon some great mysteries dimly traced in the background, and commemorated in certain great church festivals by the elder churches of Christendom; as, e.g., by the English, which does not stand as to age on the Reformation epoch, by the Romish, and by the Greek. He had composed a body of about 330 sermons, which thus, at the rate of two every Sunday, revolved through a cycle of three years; that period being modestly assumed as sufficient for insuring to their eloquence total oblivion. Possibly to a cynic some shorter cycle might have seemed equal to that effect, since their topics rose but rarely above the level of prudential ethics; and the style, though scholarly, was not impressive. As a preacher, Mr. H. was sincere, but not earnest. He was a good and conscientious man; and he made a high valuation of the pulpit as an organ of civilisation for co-operating with books; but it was impossible for any man, starting from the low ground of themes so unimpassioned and so desultory as the benefits of industry, the danger from bad companions, the importance of setting a good example, or the value of perseverance – to pump up any persistent stream of earnestness either in himself or in his auditors. These auditors, again, were not of a class to desire much earnestness. There were no naughty people among them: most of them were rich, and came to church in carriages: and, as a natural result of their esteem for my reverend guardian, a number of them combined to build a church for him – viz., St. Peter's – at the point of confluence between Mosley Street and the newly projected Oxford Street; then existing only as a sketch in the portfolio of a surveyor. But what connected myself individually with Mr. H. was, that two or three years previously I, together with one of my brothers (five years my senior), had been placed under his care for classical instruction. This was done, I believe, in obedience to a dying injunction of my father, who had a just esteem for Mr. S. H. as an upright man, but apparently too exalted an opinion of his scholarship: for he was but an indifferent Grecian. In whatever way the appointment arose, so it was that this gentleman, previously tutor in the Roman sense to all of us, now became to my brother and myself tutor also in the common English sense. From the age of eight, up to eleven and a-half, the character and intellectual attainments of Mr. H. were therefore influentially important to myself in the development of my powers, such as they were. Even his 330 sermons, which rolled overhead with such slender effect upon his general congregation, to me became a real instrument of improvement. One-half of these, indeed, were all that I heard; for, as my father's house (Greenhay) stood at this time in the country, Manchester not having yet overtaken it, the distance obliged us to go in a carriage, and only to the morning service; but every sermon in this morning course was propounded to me as a textual basis upon which I was to raise a mimic duplicate – sometimes a pure miniature abstract – sometimes a rhetorical expansion – but preserving as much as possible of the original language; and also (which puzzled me painfully) preserving the exact succession of the thoughts; which might be easy where they stood in some dependency upon each other, as, for instance, in the development of an argument, but in arbitrary or chance arrangements was often as trying to my powers as any feat of rope-dancing. I, therefore, amongst that whole congregation,13 was the one sole careworn auditor – agitated about that which, over all other heads, flowed away like water over marble slabs – viz., the somewhat torpid sermon of my somewhat torpid guardian. But this annoyance was not wholly lost: and those same 330/2 sermons, which (lasting only through sixteen minutes each) were approved and forgotten by everybody else, for me became a perfect palæstra of intellectual gymnastics far better suited to my childish weakness than could have been the sermons of Isaac Barrow or Jeremy Taylor. In these last, the gorgeous imagery would have dazzled my feeble vision, and in both the gigantic thinking would have crushed my efforts at apprehension. I drew, in fact, the deepest benefits from this weekly exercise. Perhaps, also, in the end it ripened into a great advantage for me, though long and bitterly I complained of it, that I was not allowed to use a pencil in taking notes: all was to be charged upon the memory.