What I Remember, Volume 2 | Page 2

child is father to the man. The Shakespearian passage which
earliest impressed my childish mind and carried with it my heartiest
sympathies was the song of old Autolycus:
"Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way, And merrily hent the stile-a: Your
merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a."
Over how many miles of "foot-path way," under how many green
hedges, has my childish treble chanted that enlivening ditty!
But that was in much earlier days to those I am now writing of.
During the years between my dreary time at Birmingham and my first
departure for Italy, I find the record of many pedestrian or other
rambles in England and abroad. There they are, all recorded day by
day--the qualities of the inns and the charges at them (not so much less
than those of the present day as might be imagined, with the exception
of the demands for beds), the beauty and specialties of the views, the
talk of wayfaring companions, the careful measurements of the
churches, the ever-recurring ascent of the towers of them, &c. &c.
Here and there in the mountains of chaff there may be a grain worth
preserving, as where I read that at Haddon Hall the old lady who
showed the house, and who boasted that her ancestors had been
servitors of the possessors of it for more than three hundred years,
pointed out to me the portrait of one of them, who had been "forester,"
hanging in the hall. She also pointed out the window from which a
certain heiress had eloped, and by doing so had carried the hall and
lands into the family of the present owners, and told me that Mrs.
Radcliffe, shortly before the publication of her Mysteries of Udolpho,
had visited Haddon, and had sat at that window busily writing for a
long time.
I seem to have been an amateur of sermons in those days, from the
constant records I find of sermons listened to, by no means always, or
indeed generally, complimentary to the preachers. Here is an entry
criticising, with young presumption, a sermon by Dr. Dibdin, whose
bibliophile books, however, I had much taste for.

"I heard Dr. Dibdin preach. He preached with much gesticulation,
emphasis, and grimace the most utterly trashy sermon I ever heard;
words--words--words--without the shadow of an idea in them."
I remember, as if it were yesterday, a shrewd sort of an old lady, the
mother, I think, of the curate of the parish, who heard me, as we were
leaving the church, expressing my opinion of the doctor's discourse,
saying, "Well, it is a very old story, young gentleman, and it is mighty
difficult to find anything new to say about it!"
The bibliomaniacal doctor, however, seems to have pleased me better
out of the pulpit than in it, for I find that "he called in the afternoon and
chatted amusingly for an hour. He fell tooth and nail upon the Oxford
Tracts men, and told us of a Mr. Wackerbarth, a curate in Essex, a
Cambridge man, who, he says, elevates the host, crosses himself, and
advocates burning of heretics. It seems to me, however," continues this
censorious young diarist, "that those who object to the persecution,
even to extermination of heretics, admit the uncertainty and
dubiousness of all theological doctrine and belief. For if it be certain
that God will punish disbelief in doctrines essential to salvation, and
certain that any Church possesses the knowledge what those doctrines
are, does it not follow that a man who goes about persuading people to
reject those doctrines should be treated as we treat a mad dog loose in
the streets of a city?" Thus fools, when they are young enough, rush in
where wise men fear to tread!
I had entirely forgotten, but find from my diary that it was our pleasant
friend but indifferent preacher, Dr. Dibdin, who on the 11th of
February, 1839, married my sister, Cecilia, to Mr., now Sir John,
Tilley.
It appears that I was not incapable of appreciating a good sermon when
I heard one, for I read of the impression produced upon me by an
"admirable sermon preached by Mr. Smith" (it must have been Sydney,
I take it) in the Temple Church. The preacher quoted largely from
Jeremy Taylor, "giving the passages with an excellence of enunciation
and expression which impressed them on my mind in a manner which
will not allow me to forget them." Alack! I have forgotten every word

of them!
I remember, however, perfectly well, without any reference to my diary,
hearing--it must have been much about the same time--Sydney Smith
preach a sermon at St. Paul's, which much impressed me. He took for
his text, "Knowledge and wisdom shall be the stability of