knock, but having given
them admission he went away at rather a brisk, if not a hasty pace.

Darby having concluded this interview was proceeding, not exactly in the
direction of M'Clutchy's, but as the reader shall soon hear, to a very
different person, no other than the Rev. Phineas Lucre, D.D., Rector of
the Parish of Castle Cumber; a living at that time worth about eighteen
hundred a year.

The Rev. Phineas Lucre, then, was a portly gentleman, having a proud,
consequential air stamped upon his broad brow and purple features.
His wife was niece to a nobleman, through whose influence he had been
promoted over the head of a learned and pious curate, whose junior
Mr. Lucre had been in the ministry only about the short period of
twenty-five years. Many persons said that the curate had been badly
treated in this transaction, but those persons must have known that
he had no friends except the poor and afflicted of his parish, whose
recommendation of him to his bishop, or the minister of the day,
would have had little weight. His domestic family, too, was large, a
circumstance rather to his disadvantage; but he himself was of studious,
simple, and inexpensive habits. As for dinners he gave none, except
a few fragments of his family's scanty meal to some hungry, perhaps,
deserted children, or to a sick laborer when abandoned by his landlord
or employer, the moment he became unable to work. From the gentry of
the neighborhood he got no invitations, because he would neither
sing--dance--drink--nor countenance the profligacies of their sons--nor
flatter the pride and vanity of their wives and daughters. For these
reasons, and because he dared to preach home truths from his pulpit, he
and his unpretending children had been frequently made objects of their
ridicule and insolence. What right, then, had any one to assert that the
Rev. Mr. Clement had received injustice by the promotion over his head
of the Rev. Phineas Lucre, to the wealthy living of Castle Cumber,
when he had no plausible or just grounds beyond those to which we have
adverted, on which to rest his claim for preferment? The curate was
pious, we admit, but, then, his wife's uncle was not a lord. He was
learned, but, then, he had neither power nor the inclination to repay
his patrons--supposing him to have such, by a genius for intrigue,
or the possession of political influence. He discharged his religious
duties as well as the health of a frame worn by affliction,