Old Country Life

by S. Baring-Gould

Nor one so old has left this world of sin,

More like the being that he entered in."

Clever, true, and cutting. Crabbe knew the class, its excellences and its weaknesses. We are considering the excellences now; we will recur to the weaknesses later.

Fielding does, in his Joseph Andrews, give us a study of another type of parson—Trulliber, "whom Adams found stript into his waistcoat, with an apron on, and a pail in his hands, just come from serving his hogs; for Mr. Trulliber was a parson on Sundays, but all the other six might be more properly called a farmer. He occupied a small piece of land of his own, besides which he rented a considerable deal more. His wife milked his cows, managed his dairy, and followed the market with butter and eggs. The hogs fell chiefly to his care, which he carefully waited on at home, and attended to fairs; on which occasion he was liable to many jokes, his own size being with much ale rendered little inferior to that of the beasts he sold.... His voice was loud and hoarse, and his accent extremely broad. To complete the whole, he had a stateliness in his gait when he walked, not unlike of a goose, only he stalked slower."

But this parson was only a boor, he was not disorderly.

I have an old coachman, near eighty, who has been in the family since he was a boy, and of whom I get many stories of how the world went at the beginning of this century. Said he to me one day, "My old uncle he lived in Maristowe; he was bedridden nigh on twenty years, and in all those years Parson Teasdale didn't miss coming to see and read and pray with him every day, Sunday and week-day alike."

We make much fuss about parochial visiting now, but is there any visiting like that? In The Velvet Cushion, a dialogue between the Vicar and his wife is chronicled.

"'I am not sure,' said the Vicar, 'that it is not a presumptuous reliance upon the goodness of God,—an abuse of the doctrine of Divine mercy, that has kept me at home to-day, when I should have gone to visit old Dame Wilkins. An' so now, my dear, let us go to Mary Wilkins' directly.' Her bonnet was soon on, and they hobbled down the village almost as fast as if their house had been on fire. Mary Wilkins was a poor good woman, to whom the Vicar's visit three times a week had become almost one of the necessaries of life. It was now two hours beyond the time he usually came; and had she been awake, she would really have been pained by the delay. But, happily, she had fallen into a profound sleep, and when he put his foot on the threshold, and in his old-fashioned way said, 'Peace be with you,' she was just awaking. This comforted our good man, and, as he well knew where all comfort comes from, he thanked God in his heart even for this."

The old parsons lived more on the social level of the farmers and yeomen than of the squires, but they were in many cases men of very considerable culture. It was not, however, those who were the best scholars who were the best parsons. I will give presently my reminiscences of one of the last of the old scholar-parsons. Unfortunately, scholarship is on the decline, at all events among those who occupy country parsonages.