YOUR reply, my dear Eusebius, has not at all surprised me. You tell me that my account of parochial matters first made you laugh very heartily, and then made you very sad: and had you been curate of, what effect would the incidents themselves have had upon you? precisely the same as the narration, excepting that the scene of your immoderate mirth, if not of your sorrow, would have been one not quite so safe as that closed library, where, though it be full of information, there are no informers, and from which you date your letter. And I doubt if you would not have had more real occasion for your subsequent sadness. I am aware that to many, the parochial memorabilia might appear overcharged or feigned-but it is not so. I have often heard you say, that Truth beats Fiction all the world over -and you are right. More extraordinary things happen, than imagination can well conceive, and happen every day too, in all cities, in all villages, and in most families; but they often are the results of progressive action, and intermixed with everyday proceedings, and are not therefore collected at once, and to the immediate point of their oddity, or of their pathos. The novelist, the tragedian, and the comedian, by the mere power of separation and omission, of all that does not bear upon the chief incident to be enforced, excite in us most wonderful emotion; but only so long as they keep within the bounds of nature. A few facts may be collected, and but a few, considering that every moment of life is teeming with them-they are the stock for all writers; but, my dear Eusebius, I believe the absolute invention of them to be very rare. here, I must observe, that a great part of mankind suffer things to pass before their very eyes, without their seeing them, in their exact and true bearing. How many even educated persons do you not daily meet with, who are totally deficient in any perception of wit, or even of the more broad ridiculous? I know one whole family, consisting of many individuals, to whom, on my first acquaintance, I appeared very disadvantageously, from

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their utter misconception of my meaning, when I spoke facetiously, and ad absurdum. It must be very broad farce, indeed, that must move any given mass. Think but for a moment of the mummeries and absurdities that fanaticism will invest with seriousness. I have seen the puppet-show, from the habit of attraction, employed as an adjunct to divinity. Where? it will be asked wherever I make the assertion. Then the matter of fact will prove it. Many years ago I was at Milan on Christmas Day; while the service was going on within the Duomo, immediately before it on the outside, was a common itinerant Punch puppet-show, in which was enacted, in imitation of the choice of Hercules, the Young Man's Tempation and Choice. He was between the devil (as commonly represented) and the Saviour. Had this appeared a ridicule, and a blasphemy, in the eyes of common spectators, the authorities would not have permitted the exhibition. I once watched a man at Venice on a little bridge near St Marc's Place, walking backwards and forwards, intreating the passers by to take the advantage of praying to his most excellent Lady, whom he exhibited in his little portable chapel, which he had set up. He had little success he became irritated-shook his fist at "Our Lady," calling her by all sorts of abusive names, which, though some may have fancied sounded very well in Italian, will not bear translation, and slammed the door in her face; many passed-nobody laughed, and nobody seemed shocked. Did you ever, Eusebius, look into the books describing the virtues of particular saints, pretty common in all Italian villages ?-particularly of the local Madonnas-with full and particular accounts of the cures for which they are celebrated? The worldly wise authority that allows and promotes their dissemination, knows very well the extent of all that is absurd, that yet will be taken for sober serious truths, and that the faculty of a perception of the ridiculous, is not the one which they have to fear. What in fact are these innumerable saints, but the old Heathen deities,

mountain nymphs, and water nymphs, and Pan, and all the monstrous progeny that possessed the land in Heathen times, new-breeched, petticoated, and calendered, and impiously set up by their priesthood, in partnership as it were, with the one, the only Mediator? Once travelling from Naples to Rome by vetturino, as it was somewhat late, and the road had a bad reputation on account of frequent robberies, I urged the driver to make more speed, "Pense niente," said he, shaking his finger, and immediately handed me a paper, which, on opening, I found to be a receipt in form of a payment to a certain convent, and, in consequence, a regular insurance from all evils that beset travellers. There were portraits of saints, and on each side of the receipt, prints representing the different states of purgatory, and the souls released by the contribution of the pious. The paper further stated, that the insured, even though under the knife of the assassin, would be nevertheless safe, inasmuch as the souls released from purgatory, would pray to all the saints in Heaven for a rescue. No one laughed at this-but when I stated that I was not insured, and that I thought it safest for me to pay him my fare, and called witnesses to the payment, I did see a mouth curl into a smile, but I am by no means sure that it was not in contempt of my incredulity.

Here am I, in the midst of my travels, Eusebius, when, according to the modern public determination to enforce strict residence, I ought to be in my own parish, and there I will be in a few minutes. Yet I must compliment Lord Brougham a moment upon his very liberal view of clerical imprisonment, to be found in his bill. It did occur to me at the time he brought it forward, that as he was then keeper of the King's conscience, another bill should have been brought in, enforcing, with precisely the same strictness, the Chancellor's adjunction to his Majesty's side, to ensure more perpetual political "ear-whiggery," and inviting as informers and inspectors of the Siamese adhesion, every attendant and domestic of the palaces, from the Lords of the Bedchamber, to the lacqueys and runners. If any. thing could have induced a pity for the poor good King William the Fourth, in the hearts of his refractory

and radical subjects, it would have been that lamentable predicamentand with such an antipathy existing ! And how would Lord Brougham have relished the position to which he would have brought the clergy? But the attempt to make not only our parishioners, but the very servants in our houses, spies and evidences as to how many successive nights in the year our heads have rested on the parochial pillow, could only have arisen from a mind atrociously gifted with liberality. The Whigs hate the clergy, that is the truth of the matter; they think they owe us a spite; and if they are themselves at all deficient in that article, their friends, the Dissenters, will readily subscribe for prompt payment. Since I have heard, my dear Eusebius, of your intention to become a resident curate, I have much wondered what would have been your answer to Mr Lister's notable Letter of Requests, especially that request touching the not troubling him in reply with any matter not relating to the registry queries. You would, if I mistake not, have told him he was a very impertinent fellow, and so were those who put him in his office, to lecture you, and forward his insolent requests, one of which is, that you act as his pettifogging attorney to dun your churchwardens for seventeen shillings; and having given him honestly a piece of your mind, his requests would have been in the fire in a moment, though we are requested to keep them, as the following extract will show :-"I must also point out to you, that inasmuch as it cannot be calculated at what period the registerbooks and forms herewith sent to you will be filled, it is necessary that you should give timely notice (that is to say, three months beforehand), by letter addressed to me, when a further supply will be required. I request you to keep this letter with the register-books, in order that it may be consigned with them to the officiating minister by whom you may be succeeded."

Every man thinks every man mortal but himself, they say; so it is, we conjecture, with Mr Lister. He intends to survive all the present generation of the clergy, and hold official communication with their successors. Perhaps he has an eye to future church dangers, and, like the prudent insurance-offices, will not risk upon the lives of the clergy; or, perhaps, with

more modest views of his own vitality, he looks to another kind of succession, and that his requests, and the parish registers, and the parish churches, too, are to be handed over to his friends the Dissenters. Now, Eusebius, you will have, when one of us honoured clergy, to be the servant to the superintendent-registrar of your district, resident, perhaps, ten miles from you, to whom every three months you are to deliver certified copies of the entries in the register-books. Off you must trudge every quarter your ten miles with your copies, under penalty of being found guilty of misdemeanour, and appear before the Grand Lama, the deputy-registrar, who will say, when he is at leisure to attend to you, "Stand, and deliver!" My dear friend, pause a moment-you will surely be guilty of a misdemeanour ; and all your parishioners do not know that the pillory is done away with, and will, if they owe you a spite for laughing, think themselves entitled to throw rotten eggs at you, in anticipation of the sentence of the court. In the first place, you will never know the quarter-day; in the next place, if told, you would receive the intimation as an indignity; and should you find yourself by accident or mistake before the great deputy-registrar, you would so bethink you of " my Lord Marquis of Carabas" and Puss in Boots, or some other nursery or whimsical tale, that you would laugh in his face, and fling your copy to the winds-and would that be safe? Have they not now-adays, contiguous parochial bastiles; and where would you be? And if there but for a visit, how would you pity the poor inmates that must not have a window that looks out upon the blessed green fields, nor their own crony friends to look in upon them? And would not you tell them all, that it is a sin and a shame to separate man and wife for they were married upon Christian terms, "that no man should put asunder those whom God hath joined together?" You would point out that our present marriage service says truly, "For be ye well assured, that so many as are coupled together otherwise than God's word doth allow, are not joined together by God; neither is their matrimony lawful." You would tell the people that they were no longer necessarily to be joined together by God, that there might be a better pretext for separating them.

You will certainly, Eusebius, when it comes to the point, be taken up as an incendiary. Words burnt Bristol; and, my dear friend, yours are occasionally the "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.' You never will mince matters even with an Act of Parliament that blows hot and cold-that authorizes two contradictory thingsFirst, that people may be coupled together without God's word at all, and their matrimony be lawful; and, secondly, that you should be required solemnly to declare, at the altar, that all such marriages are "unlawful"that is, you are bound to declare that to be unlawful which the same act that so binds you (for you have no other form given) makes lawful. My dear friend, you have too strange and too free a spirit for these things. I fear you, with many of us, will be open to the malice of the base and mean minded, who are ready to take advantage of all our slips, inadvertencies, and omissions; those who, with the plea of conscience for urging all these changes, will have no respect for yours or mine. I should say that the deputy-registrars are not, in respect of marriage, treated much better than the clergy, for they are bound to make and attest as a civil contract, merely that which their consciences tell them should be a religious contract, unless it be intended by this very clause in the Marriage Act to give a monopoly of the office to Dissenters. Now, Eusebius, you will have to ask very impertinent questions yourself, which I am confident you never can do; for every woman that presents herself at the altar to be married must be asked her age, which all do not like to tell, and you must (a very odd thing indeed) tell, I know not how you are to learn it, "her condition," not meaning her rank or profession, which forms the next item you are to put down for the information of the Deputy Registrar. I am sure I cannot tell what any lady's or others' condition may be, nor am I very curious to know what has been her profession previous to marriage; but suppose all this settled somehow or other, with or without odium to the questioner, you will have other scrutinies to make, that I am sure your delicacy will shrink from; and yet you will not relish the certifying to anything you do not know. Yet you are required to certify, "that you have on such a day baptized a male child produced to

you," &c.; and that some difficulty may be put in the way of infant baptisms, which are by this Act discouraged, the poor, who now pay nothing, will have to pay one shilling. Take great care in your touching these precious registers of Mr Listers', for if you soil them you will be subjected to a heavy pecuniary fine; you, in mockery, will furnish yourself with a pair of silver tongs. In short, my dear Eusebius, you will expose all this legislative folly in a thousand ways, and perhaps make a foot-ball of the Whig enactments at the church porch, and render yourself an object on whom authorities may exercise a yindictive tyranny.

You

You tell me that you have been giving some attention to the study of medicine, that you may be useful to the poor. I fear you vainly flatter yourself: although, now that the poor are farmed out at a few farthings per head-a price at which none but the lowest of the profession can come forward, or those who look upon the advantage thereby offered of subjects for experiment, I am not surprised that one so humane as yourself should think some medical knowledge requisite in the clergy, to prevent the effects of this cruelty of the Poor-Law Commissioner; and yet your knowledge will gain you no credit. will have powerful rivals, who will think you encroach upon their privileges; and should you practice largely, and prevail on the sick to take your remedies, before you have been long in the parish, you will find many a death put down at your door, as a sin and a shame. Do you think (to say nothing of neighbouring Ladies Bountiful), that the old village crones will quietly give up the sovereign virtue of their simples, their oils, their extracts, their profits, and their prescriptive right of killing their neighbours after the old fashion, to please a curate, and one of such vagaries, they will add! Infants will still die of gin and Daffy's Elixir, and the wonder will be pretty widely circulated that you are not haunted by their ghosts. And should you quit the parish, and visit it again after many years, depend upon it, though from a different cause, you will have as much reason as Gil Blas had, when he came in sight of Valladolid, to sigh "alas, there I practised physic." And, besides these old

and

say,

crones, you will have opponents you wot not of. There is the cunning man within a few miles of you, who has a wonderful practice; there is the itinerant herbalist, and the drunken hedge doctor, who entitles himself M.D., and talks volubly of the ignorance of professional men in general. There was such an one recently in this neighbourhood, who might have made a fortune among the farmers' wives, from five shilling fees, had he known how to keep them. He had a sure method; he used to frequent the village shop, and converse half familiarly, and half learnedly, with the incomers; and frequently when a proper dupe left the shop, he used to remark to the bystanders, that he could see by that person's complexion, interlarding unintelligible words, that he or she was going into a dropsy, and sometimes a disease whose name the poor ignorant creatures never heard of, taking care to be always intelligible in the main point, that he could avert the dreadful malady. From this ingenuity he had much practice, and acquired a reputation for wonderful cures. But, oh! Eusebius, the cruel herbalist, I never can forget that man, nor the sight he showed me. The case was this: the sexton's wife was suffering from a cancer; I interested myself much about her, and made interest with my friend, a most able surgeon, and humane, sensible man, to see her; he did so, and told me nothing could be done for her then, but to retard the progress of the disease; and he liberally supplied her with bandages. In this state she put herself under the travelling herbalist. He very soon made a horrible wound, and promised a cure in a few weeks, receiving as carnest money about forty shillings.

She suffered dreadful tortures from his corroding applications; but, clinging to life, endured all in hope of a cure. I desired to be sent for at his next visit. In a few days I met him in the sick-room, and told him he was attempting impossibilities, and inflicting unnecessary pain. He removed the cloths, bared her side, and roughly pulled out a quantity of tow, which he had thrust into the wound, a deep hole, which seemed to enter her very vitals, and put it in again, saying that he would forfeit his life if he did not entirely cure her. I told him he was working