The Warden | Page 6

his daughter, for
whose service he keeps a small carriage and pair of ponies. He is,
indeed, generous to all, but especially to the twelve old men who are in
a peculiar manner under his care. No doubt with such an income Mr
Harding should be above the world, as the saying is; but, at any rate, he
is not above Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly, for he is always more or
less in debt to his son-in-law, who has, to a certain extent, assumed the
arrangement of the precentor's pecuniary affairs.
CHAPTER II
The Barchester Reformer Mr Harding has been now precentor of
Barchester for ten years; and, alas, the murmurs respecting the proceeds
of Hiram's estate are again becoming audible. It is not that any one
begrudges to Mr Harding the income which he enjoys, and the
comfortable place which so well becomes him; but such matters have
begun to be talked of in various parts of England. Eager pushing
politicians have asserted in the House of Commons, with very telling
indignation, that the grasping priests of the Church of England are
gorged with the wealth which the charity of former times has left for
the solace of the aged, or the education of the young. The well-known

case of the Hospital of St Cross has even come before the law courts of
the country, and the struggles of Mr Whiston, at Rochester, have met
with sympathy and support. Men are beginning to say that these things
must be looked into.
Mr Harding, whose conscience in the matter is clear, and who has
never felt that he had received a pound from Hiram's will to which he
was not entitled, has naturally taken the part of the church in talking
over these matters with his friend, the bishop, and his son-in-law, the
archdeacon. The archdeacon, indeed, Dr Grantly, has been somewhat
loud in the matter. He is a personal friend of the dignitaries of the
Rochester Chapter, and has written letters in the public press on the
subject of that turbulent Dr Whiston, which, his admirers think, must
wellnigh set the question at rest. It is also known at Oxford that he is
the author of the pamphlet signed 'Sacerdos' on the subject of the Earl
of Guildford and St Cross, in which it is so clearly argued that the
manners of the present times do not admit of a literal adhesion to the
very words of the founder's will, but that the interests of the church for
which the founder was so deeply concerned are best consulted in
enabling its bishops to reward those shining lights whose services have
been most signally serviceable to Christianity. In answer to this, it is
asserted that Henry de Blois, founder of St Cross, was not greatly
interested in the welfare of the reformed church, and that the masters of
St Cross, for many years past, cannot be called shining lights in the
service of Christianity; it is, however, stoutly maintained, and no doubt
felt, by all the archdeacon's friends, that his logic is conclusive, and has
not, in fact, been answered.
With such a tower of strength to back both his arguments and his
conscience, it may be imagined that Mr Harding has never felt any
compunction as to receiving his quarterly sum of two hundred pounds.
Indeed, the subject has never presented itself to his mind in that shape.
He has talked not unfrequently, and heard very much about the wills of
old founders and the incomes arising from their estates, during the last
year or two; he did even, at one moment, feel a doubt (since expelled
by his son-in-law's logic) as to whether Lord Guildford was clearly
entitled to receive so enormous an income as he does from the revenues

of St Cross; but that he himself was overpaid with his modest eight
hundred pounds--he who, out of that, voluntarily gave up sixty-two
pounds eleven shillings and fourpence a year to his twelve old
neighbours--he who, for the money, does his precentor's work as no
precentor has done it before, since Barchester Cathedral was
built,--such an idea has never sullied his quiet, or disturbed his
conscience.
Nevertheless, Mr Harding is becoming uneasy at the rumour which he
knows to prevail in Barchester on the subject. He is aware that, at any
rate, two of his old men have been heard to say, that if everyone had his
own, they might each have their hundred pounds a year, and live like
gentlemen, instead of a beggarly one shilling and sixpence a day; and
that they had slender cause to be thankful for a miserable dole of
twopence, when Mr Harding and Mr Chadwick, between them, ran
away with thousands of pounds which good old John Hiram never
intended for the like of