JOHNNY DARBYSHIRE.
BY WILLIAM HOWITT.
OHN DARBYSHIRE, or, according to the regular custom of the country, Johnny Darbyshire, was a farmer living in one of the most obscure parts of the country, on the borders of the Peak of Derbyshire. His fathers before him had occupied the same farm for generations; and as they had been Quakers from the days of George Fox, who preached there and converted them, Johnny also was a Quaker. That is, he was, as many others were, and no doubt are, habitually a Quaker. He was a Quaker in dress, in language, in attendance of their meetings, and, above all, in the unmitigated contempt which he felt and expressed for everything like fashion, for the practices of the world, for the Church, and for music and amusements. There never was a man, from the first to the present day of the society, who so thoroughly embodied and exhibited that quality attributed to the Quaker, in the rhyming nursery alphabet,—"Q was a Quaker, and would not bow down."
No, Johnny Darbyshire would not have bowed down to any mortal power. He would have marched into the presence of the king with his hat on, and would have addressed him with just the same unembarrassed freedom as "The old chap out of the West Countrie" is made to do in the song. As to any of the more humble and conceding qualities usually attributed to the peaceful Quaker, Johnny had not an atom of those about him. Never was there a more pig-headed, arbitrary, positive, pugnacious fellow. He would argue anybody out of their opinions by the hour; he would "threep them down," as he called it, that is, point blank and with a loud voice insist on his own possession of the right, and of the sound common-sense of the matter; and if he could not convince them, would at least confound them with his obstreperous din and violence of action. That was what he called clearing the field, and not leaving his antagonist a leg to stand on. Having thus fairly overwhelmed, dumfoundered, and tired out some one with his noise, he would go off in triumph, and say to the bystanders as he went, "There, lads, you see he hadn't a word to say for himself"; and truly a clever fellow must he have been who could have got a word in edgeways when Johnny had once fairly got his steam up, and was shrinking and storming like a cat-o'-mountain.
Yet had anybody told Johnny that he was no Quaker, he would have "threeped them down" that they did not know what a Quaker meant. What! were not his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him all Quakers? Was not he born in the Society, brought up in it? Hadn't he attended first-day, week-day, preparative, monthly, quarterly, and sometimes yearly meetings too, all his life? Had not he regularly and handsomely subscribed to the monthly, and the national, and the Ackworth School Stocks? Had he not been on all sorts of appointments; to visit new members, new comers into the meeting; to warn disorderly walkers; nay, had he not sate even on committees in London at yearly meetings? Had he not received and travelled with ministers when they came on religious visits into these parts? Had he not taken them in his tax-cart to the next place, and been once upset in a deep and dirty lane with a weighty ministering friend, and dislocated his collar-bone?