This man used every week day to lock himself in the church and pace the aisles for two hours, from ten till twelve o'clock. An author who in his own peculiar and admirable way, is one of the most affecting writers of any age or country, has described with characteristic feeling the different effects produced upon certain minds by entering an empty or a crowded church. “In the latter,” he says, “it is chance but some present human frailty,—an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory,—or a trait of affectation, or worse vain-glory on that of the preacher,—puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness?—go alone on some week day, borrowing the keys of good master Sexton; traverse the cool aisles of some country church; think of the piety that has kneeled there,—-the congregations old and young that have found consolation there,—the meek pastor,—the docile parishioners,—with no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee!”1
1 The Last Essays of Elia.
Harry Bingley died in lodgings at Rotherham, whither he had removed when he felt himself ill, that he might save expence by being nearer a physician. According to his own directions his body was brought back from thence to the village, and interred in the churchyard; and he strictly enjoined that no breast-plate, handles or any ornaments whatever should be affixed to his coffin, nor any gravestone placed to mark the spot where his remains were deposited.
Would or would not this godfather-general have been happier in a convent or a hermitage, than he was in thus following his own humour? It was Dr. Dove's opinion that upon the whole he would; not that a conventual, and still less an eremital way of life would have been more rational, but because there would have been a worthier motive for chusing it; and if not a more reasonable hope, at least a firmer persuasion that it was the sure way to salvation.
That Harry Bingley's mind had taken a religious turn, appeared by his chusing the church for his daily place of promenade. Meditation must have been as much his object as exercise, and of a kind which the place invited. It appeared also by the sort of Sunday-schooling which he gave the children, long before Sunday Schools,—whether for good or evil,—were instituted, or as the phrase is, invented by Robert Raikes of eccentric memory. (Patrons and Patronesses of Sunday Schools, be not offended if a doubt concerning their utility be here implied! The Doctor entertained such a doubt; and the why and the wherefore shall in due time be fairly stated.) But Bingley certainly came under the description of a humourist, rather than of a devotee or religious enthusiast; in fact he bore that character. And the Doctor's knowledge of human nature led him to conclude that solitary humourists are far from being happy. You see them, as you see the blind, at their happiest times, when they have something to divert their thoughts. But in the humourist's course of life, there is a sort of defiance of the world and the world's law; indeed any man who departs widely from its usages, avows this; and it is, as it ought to be, an uneasy and uncomfortable feeling, wherever it is not sustained by a high state of excitement; and that state, if it be lasting, becomes madness. Such persons when left to themselves and to their own reflections, as they necessarily are for the greater part of their time, must often stand not only self-arraigned for folly, but self-condemned for it.
CHAPTER LXIX.
A MUSICAL RECLUSE AND HIS SISTER.
Some proverb maker, I forget who, says, “God hath given to some men wisdom and understanding, and to others the art of playing on the fiddle.”