But it is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it. So that, in my third year of practice, I found my abstracting and condensing powers sensibly enlarged. My guardian was gradually better satisfied: for unfortunately (and in the beginning it was unfortunate) always one witness could be summoned against me upon any impeachment of my fidelity – viz., the sermon itself; since, though lurking amongst the 330, the wretch was easily forked out. But these appeals grew fewer; and my guardian, as I have said, was continually better satisfied. Meantime, might not I be continually less satisfied with him and his 330 sermons? Not at all: loving and trusting, without doubt or reserve, and with the deepest principles of veneration rooted in my nature, I never, upon meeting something more impressive than the average complexion of my guardian's discourses, for one moment thought of him as worse or feebler than others, but simply as different; and no more quarrelled with him for his characteristic languor, than with a green riband for not being blue. By mere accident, I one day heard quoted a couplet which seemed to me sublime. It described a preacher such as sometimes arises in difficult times, or in fermenting times, a son of thunder, that looks all enemies in the face, and volunteers a defiance even when it would have been easy to evade it. The lines were written by Richard Baxter – who battled often with self-created storms from the first dawn of the Parliamentary War in 1642, through the period of Cromwell (to whom he was personally odious), and, finally, through the trying reigns of the second Charles and of the second James. As a pulpit orator, he was perhaps the Whitfield of the seventeenth century – the Leuconomos of Cowper. And thus it is that he describes the impassioned character of his own preaching –

 

»I preach'd, as never sure to preach again;«

 

[Even that was telling; but then followed this thunder-peal]

 

»And as a dying man to dying men.«

 

This couplet, which seemed to me equally for weight and for splendour like molten gold, laid bare another aspect of the Catholic church; revealed it as a Church militant and crusading.

Not even thus, however, did I descry any positive imperfection in my guardian. He and Baxter had fallen upon different generations. Baxter's century, from first to last, was revolutionary. Along the entire course of that seventeenth century, the great principles of representative government and the rights of conscience14 were passing through the anguish of conflict and fiery trial. Now again in my own day, at the close of the eighteenth century, it is true that all the elements of social life were thrown into the crucible – but on behalf of our neighbours, no longer of ourselves. No longer, therefore, was invoked the heroic pleader, ready for martyrdom, preaching, therefore, »as never sure to preach again;« and I no more made it a defect in my guardian that he wanted energies for combating evils now forgotten, than that he had not in patriotic fervour leaped into a gulf, like the fabulous Roman martyr, Curtius, or in zeal for liberty had not mounted a scaffold, like the real English martyr, Algernon Sidney. Every Sunday, duly as it revolved, brought with it this cruel anxiety. On Saturday night, under sad anticipation, on Sunday night, under sadder experimental knowledge, of my trying task, I slept ill: my pillow was stuffed with thorns; and until Monday morning's inspection and armilustrium had dismissed me from parade to ›stand at ease,‹ verily I felt like a false steward summoned to some killing audit. Then suppose Monday to be invaded by some horrible intruder, visiter perhaps from a band of my guardian's poor relations, that in some undiscovered nook of Lancashire seemed in fancy to blacken all the fields, and suddenly at a single note of ›caw, caw,‹ rose in one vast cloud like crows, and settled down for weeks at the table of my guardian and his wife, whose noble hospitality would never allow the humblest among them to be saddened by a faint welcome. In such cases, very possibly the whole week did not see the end of my troubles.

On these terms, for upwards of three and a-half years – that is, from my eighth to beyond my eleventh birth-day – my guardian and I went on cordially: he never once angry, as indeed he never had any reason for anger; I never once treating my task either as odious (which in the most abominable excess it was), or, on the other hand, as costing but a trivial effort, which practice might have taught me to hurry through with contemptuous ease. To the very last I found no ease at all in this weekly task, which never ceased to be ›a thorn in the flesh:‹ and I believe that my guardian, like many of the grim Pagan divinities, inhaled a flavour of fragrant incense, from the fretting and stinging of anxiety which, as it were some holy vestal fire, he kept alive by this periodic exaction. It gave him pleasure that he could reach me in the very recesses of my dreams, where even a Pariah might look for rest; so that the Sunday, which to man, and even to the brutes within his gates, offered an interval of rest, for me was signalised as a day of martyrdom. Yet in this, after all, it is possible that he did me a service: for my constitutional infirmity of mind ran but too determinately towards the sleep of endless reverie, and of dreamy abstraction from life and its realities.

Whether serviceable or not, however, the connection between my guardian and myself was now drawing to its close. Some months after my eleventh birth-day, Greenhay15 was sold, and my mother's establishment – both children and servants – was translated to Bath: only that for a few months I and one brother were still left under the care of Mr. Samuel H.; so far, that is, as regarded our education. Else, as regarded the luxurious comforts of a thoroughly English home, we became the guests, by special invitation, of a young married couple in Manchester – viz., Mr. and Mrs. K––. This incident, though otherwise without results, I look back upon with feelings inexpressibly profound, as a jewelly parenthesis of pathetic happiness – such as emerges but once in any man's life. Mr. K.