Impressions of Theophrastus Such | Page 9

with them under
difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, and getting
acquainted with their notions and motives not by inference from
traditional types in literature or from philosophical theories, but from
daily fellowship and observation. Of course such experience is apt to
get antiquated, and my father might find himself much at a loss
amongst a mixed rural population of the present day; but he knew very
well what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, the
field-labourers, and farmers of his own time--yes, and from the
aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and
had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "A
clergyman, lad," he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit of
every class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his
inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him
beloved by his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards
him; but what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for
payment, tithe included, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe
and look well after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind
about his money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of
fat central England, and might have seemed to introduce a dangerous
laxity of supposition about Christian laymen who happened to be
creditors. My father was none the less beloved because he was
understood to be of a saving disposition, and how could he save
without getting his tithe? The sight of him was not unwelcome at any
door, and he was remarkable among the clergy of his district for having
no lasting feud with rich or poor in his parish. I profited by his
popularity, and for months after my mother's death, when I was a little
fellow of nine, I was taken care of first at one homestead and then at
another; a variety which I enjoyed much more than my stay at the Hall,
where there was a tutor. Afterwards for several years I was my father's
constant companion in his outdoor business, riding by his side on my
little pony and listening to the lengthy dialogues he held with Darby or

Joan, the one on the road or in the fields, the other outside or inside her
door. In my earliest remembrance of him his hair was already grey, for
I was his youngest as well as his only surviving child; and it seemed to
me that advanced age was appropriate to a father, as indeed in all
respects I considered him a parent so much to my honour, that the
mention of my relationship to him was likely to secure me regard
among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger--my father's stories
from his life including so many names of distant persons that my
imagination placed no limit to his acquaintanceship. He was a pithy
talker, and his sermons bore marks of his own composition. It is true,
they must have been already old when I began to listen to them, and
they were no more than a year's supply, so that they recurred as
regularly as the Collects. But though this system has been much
ridiculed, I am prepared to defend it as equally sound with that of a
liturgy; and even if my researches had shown me that some of my
father's yearly sermons had been copied out from the works of elder
divines, this would only have been another proof of his good judgment.
One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanest
understanding, but why fresh sermons?
Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if not active
innovation, that my father was a Tory who had not exactly a dislike to
innovators and dissenters, but a slight opinion of them as persons of
ill-founded self-confidence; whence my young ears gathered many
details concerning those who might perhaps have called themselves the
more advanced thinkers in our nearest market-town, tending to
convince me that their characters were quite as mixed as those of the
thinkers behind them. This circumstance of my rearing has at least
delivered me from certain mistakes of classification which I observe in
many of my superiors, who have apparently no affectionate memories
of a goodness mingled with what they now regard as outworn
prejudices. Indeed, my philosophical notions, such as they are,
continually carry me back to the time when the fitful gleams of a spring
day used to show me my own shadow as that of a small boy on a small
pony, riding by the side of a larger cob-mounted shadow over the
breezy uplands which we used to dignify with the name of hills, or