Scenes of Clerical Life | Page 3

fondness
over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for
the departed shades of vulgar errors. So it is not surprising that I recall
with a fond sadness Shepperton Church as it was in the old days, with
its outer coat of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous
windows patched with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little
flight of steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and
leading to the school-children's gallery.

Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with
delight, even when I was so crude a members of the congregation, that
my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my
devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred
edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking
uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the
escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible
possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads
and cross-bones, their leopards' paws, and Maltese crosses. There were
inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions
to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and
final flourishes, which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new
delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which
devout church-goers sat during 'lessons', trying to look anywhere else
than into each other's eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a
dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all
moments; but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense
of retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my
burst into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand
up on the seat during the psalms or the singing. And the singing was no
mechanical affair of official routine; it had a drama. As the moment of
psalmody approached, by some process to me as mysterious and
untraceable as the opening of the flowers or the breaking-out of the
stars, a slate appeared in front of the gallery, advertising in bold
characters the psalm about to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement
of the clerk should still leave the bucolic mind in doubt on that head.
Then followed the migration of the clerk to the gallery, where, in
company with a bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter understood to
have an amazing power of singing 'counter', and two lesser musical
stars, he formed the complement of a choir regarded in Shepperton as
one of distinguished attraction, occasionally known to draw hearers
from the next parish. The innovation of hymn-books was as yet
undreamed of; even the New Version was regarded with a sort of
melancholy tolerance, as part of the common degeneracy in a time
when prices had dwindled, and a cotton gown was no longer stout
enough to last a lifetime; for the lyrical taste of the best heads in
Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins. But the

greatest triumphs of the Shepperton choir were reserved for the
Sundays when the slate announced an ANTHEM, with a dignified
abstinence from particularization, both words and music lying far
beyond the reach of the most ambitious amateur in the congregation: an
anthem in which the key-bugles always ran away at a great pace, while
the bassoon every now and then boomed a flying shot after them.
As for the clergyman, Mr. Gilfil, an excellent old gentleman, who
smoked very long pipes and preached very short sermons, I must not
speak of him, or I might be tempted to tell the story of his life, which
had its little romance, as most lives have between the ages of teetotum
and tobacco. And at present I am concerned with quite another sort of
clergyman--the Rev. Amos Barton, who did not come to Shepperton
until long after Mr. Gilfil had departed this life--until after an interval
in which Evangelicalism and the Catholic Question had begun to
agitate the rustic mind with controversial debates. A Popish blacksmith
had produced a strong Protestant reaction by declaring that, as soon as
the Emancipation Bill was passed, he should do a great stroke of
business in gridirons; and the disinclination of the Shepperton
parishioners generally to dim the unique glory of St Lawrence,
rendered the Church and Constitution an affair of their business and
bosoms. A zealous Evangelical preacher had made the old
sounding-board vibrate with quite a different sort of elocution from Mr.
Gilfil's; the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New
Versions; and the great square pews were crowded with new faces from
distant corners of the parish--perhaps from Dissenting chapels.
You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of
Shepperton. He was no such thing. Those were days