urch and churchyard of Bullhampton are indeed perfect, and yet
but few people go to see it. It has not as yet had its own bard to
sing its praises. Properly it is called Bullhampton Monachorum, the
living having belonged to the friars of Chiltern. The great tithes
now go to the Earl of Todmorden, who has no other interest in the
place whatever, and who never saw it. The benefice belongs to St.
John's, Oxford, and as the vicarage is not worth more than L400 a
year, it happens that a clergyman generally accepts it before he has
lived for twenty or thirty years in the common room of his college.
Mr. Fenwick took it on his marriage, when he was about twenty-seven,
and Bullhampton has been lucky.

The bulk of the parish belongs to the Marquis of Trowbridge, who,
however, has no residence within ten miles of it. The squire of the
parish is Squire Gilmore,--Harry Gilmore,--and he possesses every
acre in it that is not owned by the Marquis. With the village, or
town as it may be, Mr. Gilmore has no concern; but he owns a large
tract of the water meads, and again has a farm or two up on the
downs as you go towards Chiltern. But they lie out of the parish of
Bullhampton. Altogether he is a man of about fifteen hundred a year,
and as he is not as yet married, many a Wiltshire mother's eye is
turned towards Hampton Privets, as Mr. Gilmore's house is, somewhat
fantastically, named.

Mr. Gilmore's character must be made to develope itself in these
pages,--if such developing may be accomplished. He is to be our
hero,--or at least one of two. The author will not, in these early
words, declare that the squire will be his favourite hero, as he
will wish that his readers should form their own opinions on that
matter. At this period he was a man somewhat over thirty,--perhaps
thirty-three years of age, who had done fairly well at Harrow and at
Oxford, but had never done enough to make his friends regard him as a
swan. He still read a good deal; but he shot and fished more than he
read, and had become, since his residence at the Privets, very fond
of the outside of his books. Nevertheless, he went on buying books,
and was rather proud of his library. He had travelled a good deal,
and was a politician,--somewhat scandalising his own tenants and
other Bullhamptonites by voting for the liberal candidates for his
division of the county. The Marquis of Trowbridge did not know him,
but regarded him as an objectionable person, who did not unders