SHELBURNE ESSAYS

FOURTH SERIES

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW

SOME thirty years ago, in 1875 to be exact, that unstable compound, the English Church, was shocked by the news that a Cornish clergyman, dying away from home, had received the sacraments from the hands of a Roman priest. Over the head of his young wife, who had summoned the ministrant to his bedside, there was poured a bitter stream of controversy, as was the wont of the Establishment in those days; and the storm was not allayed by the publication a few months later of a somewhat irresponsible biography of the apostate by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould. It was then seen that this deathbed conversion was only the last act of a life crammed with eccentricities, and from that day to this the Vicar of Morwenstow has enjoyed a kind of pre-eminence in curiosity. At last his son-inlaw, Mr. C. E. Byles, has collected his scattered prose and verse in two attractive volumes, and has added to these a full and accurate record of