There were Romilly, the law
reformer, and Tierney, Plunkett, and Huskisson (all great orators), and
other eminent men whose names were on every tongue. The traveller,
entranced by the power and eloquence of these leaders, could scarcely
have failed to feel that the House of Commons was the most glorious
assembly on earth, the incarnation of the highest political wisdom, the
theatre and school of the noblest energies, worthy to instruct and guide
the English nation, or any other nation in the world.

From the legislature we follow our traveller to the Church,--the
Established Church of course, for non-conformist ministers, whatever
their learning and oratorical gifts, ranked scarcely above shopkeepers
and farmers, and were viewed by the aristocracy as leaders of sedition
rather than preachers of righteousness. The higher dignitaries of the
only church recognized by fashion and rank were peers of the realm,
presidents of colleges, dons in the universities, bishops with an income
of L10,000 a year or more, deans of cathedrals, prebendaries and
archdeacons, who wore a distinctive dress from the other clergy. I need
not say that they were the most aristocratic, cynical, bigoted, and
intolerant of all the upper ranks in the social scale, though it must be
confessed that they were generally men of learning and respectability,
more versed, however, in the classics of Greece and Rome than in Saint
Paul's epistles, and with greater sympathy for the rich than for the
poor, to whom the gospel was originally preached. The untitled clergy of
the Church in their rural homes,--for the country and not the city was
the paradise of rectors and curates, as of squires and men of
leisure,--were also for the most part classical scholars and gentlemen,
though some thought more of hunting and fishing than of the sermons they
were to preach on Sundays. Nothing to the eye of a cultivated traveller
was more fascinating than the homes of these country clergymen,
rectories and parsonages as they were called,--concealed amid
shrubberies, groves, and gardens, where flowers bloomed by the side of
the ivy and myrtle, ever green and flourishing. They were not large but
comfortable, abodes of plenty if not of luxury, freeholds which could
not be taken away, suggestive of rest and repose; for the favored
occupant of such a holding, supported by tithes, could neither be
ejected nor turned out of his "living," which he held for life, whether
he preached wel