up
together all sorts of information in due proportions into one whole, in
the shape of an octavo--epitomizing every kind of history belonging to the
parish, from peer's palace to peasant's hut! What are clergymen
perpetually about? Not always preaching and praying; or marrying,
christening, and burying people. They ought to tell us all about it; to
moralize, to poetize, to philosophize; to paint the manners living as they
rise, or dead as they fall; to take Time by the forelock, and measure the
marks of his footsteps; to show us the smoke curling up from embowered
chimneys; or, since woods must go down, to record the conquests of the
biting axe; to celebrate the raising of every considerable roof-tree, to
lament all dilapidations and crumbling away of ivied walls; to inform us
how many fathoms deep is the lake with its abbeyed island--why the pool
below the aged bridge gets shallower and shallower every year, so that it
can no more shelter a salmon--what are the sports, and games, and pastimes
of the parishioners--what books they read, if any--if the punishment of
the stocks be obsolete--or the stang--or the jougs--if the bowels of the
people yearn after strange doctrine--if the parish has produced any good
or great murderer, incendiary, or other criminal. In short, why might not
the history of each of the twenty or thirty thousand parishes of Great
Britain--we speak at random--be each a history of human nature, at once
entertaining and instructive? How infinitely better such books than
pamphlets on political economy, for example, now encumbering the whole
land! Nay, even than single sermons, or bundles of sermons, all like so
many sticks--strong when tied all together, but when taken separately,
weak and frush. We have no great opinion of county histories in general,
though we believe there are some goodish ones, from which we purpose, ere
long, to construct some superior articles. A county history, to be worth
much, should run from sixty to six hundred volumes. No library could well
stand that for many years. But a judicious selection might be made from
the thirty thousand parish histories--that would afford charming reading
to the largest family during the longest nights--in the intervals between
the Scotch Novels. Form the circle round the fire--when winter crimps and
freezes--or round the open bow-window, now that summer roasts and broils,
and get her whose voice is like a silver bell to read it up, right on from
b