olk. There
were few local newspapers in those days to tell their virtues, to print
their sermons or their speeches at the opening of bazaars or
flower-shows. They did their duty and passed away and were forgotten;
while the parsons, like the wretch Chowne of the _Maid of Sker_, live on
in anecdote, and grave folk shake their heads and think that the times
must have been very bad, and the clergy a disgrace to their cloth. As
with the clerk, so with his master; the evil that men do lives after
them, the good is forgotten. There has been a vast amount of
exaggeration in the accounts that have come down to us of the
faithlessness, sluggishness, idleness, and base conduct of the clergy of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and perhaps a little too
much boasting about the progress which our age has witnessed.

It would be an easy task to record the lives of many worthy country
clergymen of the much-abused Hanoverian period, who were exemplary
parish priests, pious, laborious, and beloved. In recording the
eccentricities and lack of reverence of many clerics and their faithful
servitors, it is well to remember the many bright lights that shone like
lamps in a dark place.

It would be a difficult task to write a history of our parish
priesthood, for reasons which have already been stated, and such a
labour is beyond our present purpose. But it may be well to record a few
of the observations which contemporary writers have made upon the
parsons of their day in order to show that they were by no means a set
of careless, disreputable, and unworthy men.

During the greater part of the eighteenth century there lived at
Seathwaite, Lancashire, as curate, the famous Robert Walker, styled "the
Wonderful," "a man singular for his temperance, industry, and
integrity," as the parish register records.

Wordsworth alludes to him in his eighteenth sonnet on Durdon as a worthy
compeer of the country parson of Chaucer, and in the seventh book of the
_Excursion_ an abstract of his character is given:

"A priest abides before whose lips such doubts
Fall to the ground, as in those days
When this low pile a gospel preacher knew
Whose good works formed an endless retinue;
A pastor such as Chaucer's verse portrays,
Such as the heaven-taught skill of Herbert drew,
And tender Goldsmith crown'd with deathless praise."

The poet also gives a short memoir of the Wonderful Walker. In this
occurs the