I suppose dear Hugh Pearson was very ugly, but one loved him so much, one thought there was no face like his. Though he was so very much older than I was, there was no one with whom I was more intimate, and nothing I would not have confided to him. His goodness, his religion, were equally attractive and charming to all. One never felt with him as if God had been rather unfortunate in His good intentions. His christian spirit christianised everything it came in contact with. His memory is a possession, and I may exclaim like the Duke of Ormonde, “I would not exchange my dead friend for any living friend in Christendom.” In the later years of his life, he had yielded to urgent request in accepting a canonry at Windsor, where I had delighted to visit him; but his heart was always in his country vicarage of Sonning on the Thames, and with his dear people there. He had refused the Queen’s persistent offer that he should succeed Arthur Stanley at Westminster, saying that he wished to die as he had lived—“a private person.”
The end came suddenly. On Easter Sunday (April 9) he told his people that it was his fortieth Easter Sunday amongst them, but he was taken ill whilst he was preaching, and two days after mortification came on. On Wednesday, the last evening of his life, when it was known that there was no hope of saving it, he desired that all his people—his true children—might be admitted to see him once more, and for three hours multitudes of his parishioners, men, women, and children, passed weeping through his room. He was able to speak separately to many of them, to give them all his blessing, and with a message of peace—the last effort of his great loving heart—upon his lips, he passed into the perfect life.
He has left the most undimmed memory it is possible for man to leave. To none of those who knew him is it possible that there can be even a breath upon the mirror of his perfectly beautiful and lovable life. To no one could the words of Dante be applied with greater truth:—
“E se’l mondo sapesse il cor ch’ egli ebbe,
Assai lo loda e più lo loderebbe.”
“O ye holy and humble men of heart, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.”
Journal.
“London, June 4, 1882.—In the last week I have spent three pleasant days with the Husseys at Scotney, a lovely place, where an old tower of Richard the Second’s time and a ruined house by Inigo Jones stand in a wooded hollow, surrounded by a moat so clear that its reflections are even brighter than the reality. On the hill above is a handsome modern house with a glorious garden of azaleas and herbaceous flowers formed out of an old quarry. Here at this season ‘tout fourmille de vie,’ as Buffon would say. In the Roman Catholic persecution a priest was long imprisoned in the dungeon of the old tower, but escaped by persuading his gaolers that robbers had broken into the stables and were carrying off the horses, and by swimming across the moat whilst they were gone to the rescue.