At lanter the card-lakers sat i’ the loft.”
HABITS AND HABILIMENTS.
I don’t mean that this exact arrangement of guests was religiously followed at the Seathwaite Parsonage hakes, but such, beyond dispute, were the staple amusements on these jolly occasions. One custom of Mr Walker’s public, I should mention as differing from the practice of its successors; ale, if “drunk on the premises,” was charged fourpence per quart, but if swallowed outside, on the road or in the church-yard, only threepence. The ale licence was taken out in the name of his brother. He refused to have any dealings with Quakers, because, as I understand the matter, that stiff-necked generation have some out-of-the-way and inconvenient notions about the propriety of paying Church dues.
He discharged his clerical duties zealously and faithfully for sixty-six years at Seathwaite alone, which was his third benefice. He brought up, educated well and established well in life, a numerous family, and, in 1802, died universally lamented, at the age of ninety-three, leaving two thousand pounds and a large quantity of linen and woollen cloth spun by himself, chiefly within the communion rails, where he had his seat when engaged in teaching the young intelligences of the dale to read and write.
The following descriptive sketch of his ordinary dress and occupations occurs in a letter from Conistone in 1754:—“I found him sitting at the head of a large square table, such as is commonly used in this country by the lower class of people, dressed in a coarse blue frock, trimmed with black-horn buttons; a checked shirt, a leathern strap about his neck for a stock, a coarse apron, and a pair of great wooden-soled shoes plated with iron to preserve them (what we call clogs in these parts), with a child upon his knee, eating his breakfast; his wife, and the remainder of his children, were some of them engaged in waiting upon each other, the rest in teazing and spinning wool, at which trade he is a great proficient; and, moreover, when it is made ready for sale, he will lay it, by sixteen or thirty-two pounds weight, upon his back, and on foot, seven or eight miles, will carry it to market, even in the depth of winter. I was not much surprised at all this, as you may possibly be, having heard a great deal of it related before. But I must confess myself astonished with the alacrity and the good humour that appeared both in the clergyman and his wife, and more so at the sense and ingenuity of the clergyman himself.”
COMMENTARY.
After all, these are but every day wonders and amount to no more than the bare fact of a resolute, conscientious, and very indigent man, carrying with him into the Church the stern habits of frugality, industry, temperance, and self-denial in which he was reared, and which he doubtless had seen practised in his father’s family from his earliest childhood. One really might suppose that the Poet Laureate and the Principal of Saint Bees, his most prominently eulogistic biographers, are struck with admiring astonishment on discovering such an assemblage of homely working-day virtues in a clergyman (though very sorry should I be to insinuate that the cloth deserve the imputation); for they may see, and must have seen, the same virtues practised, under circumstances less favourable to their development, amongst the humble classes of the laity often enough without considering themselves called upon to say or to think anything about the matter. But, however that may be, the humble grave of “Wonderful Walker,” chiefly under the influence of Mr Wordsworth’s writings, has become a shrine before which many, from great distances, bow annually; and at one of my visits to Seathwaite I fell in with a much esteemed elderly friend, who, with a party of ladies, had made an excursion, half pilgrimage, half pic-nic, to Robert Walker’s tomb and Church, and he declared with much appearance, and, I doubt not, much reality of feeling, that it gave him higher gratification to stand by “this low Pile,” and that simple unadorned place of rest, than he could have derived from a visit to any scene the most famous in ancient or modern history.
CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE OLD CLERGY.
I hope I shall be acquitted of any wish to depreciate the real excellences of Robert Walker’s character; but I maintain that it is scarcely just to the bulk of human kind to bestow the title of “Wonderful” upon an individual who to the frugality, temperance, integrity, and industry of the class he sprang from, superadded the piety, purity, and some of the learning of the profession he adopted. But, as sings the Roman poet—
Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona