fields, the other outside or inside her door. In my earliest
remembrance of him his hair was already grey, for I was his youngest as
well as his only surviving child; and it seemed to me that advanced age
was appropriate to a father, as indeed in all respects I considered him
a parent so much to my honour, that the mention of my relationship to
him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a
stranger--my father's stories from his life including so many names of
distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his
acquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his sermons bore marks of
his own composition. It is true, they must have been already old when I
began to listen to them, and they were no more than a year's supply, so
that they recurred as regularly as the Collects. But though this system
has been much ridiculed, I am prepared to defend it as equally sound
with that of a liturgy; and even if my researches had shown me that some
of my father's yearly sermons had been copied out from the works of
elder divines, this would only have been another proof of his good
judgment. One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanest
understanding, but why fresh sermons?

Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if not active
innovation, that my father was a Tory who had not exactly a dislike to
innovators and dissenters, but a slight opinion of them as persons of
ill-founded self-confidence; whence my young ears gathered many details
concerning those who might perhaps have called themselves the more
advanced thinkers in our nearest market-town, tending to convince me
that their characters were quite as mixed as those of the thinkers
behind them. This circumstance of my rearing has at least delivered me
from certain mistakes of classification which I observe in many of my
superiors, who have apparently no affectionate memories of a goodness
mingled with what they now regard as outworn prejudices. Indeed, my
philosophical notions, such as they are, continually carry me back to
the time when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my own
shadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of a
larger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used to
dignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads with broad grassy
borders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way to outlying
hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to m