ife recumbent head to head, covered a
large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the Bathurst and other
monuments called forth first the fear and then the pride of the parish
clerk's eldest son. In those days the clerk had just below the pulpit
the desk from which his sonorous "Amen" sounded forth, while his family
occupied a low gallery rising from the same level up behind the pulpit.
There the boys of the free school also could be under the master's eye,
and with instruments of music like those of King David, but now
banished from even village churches, would accompany him in the
doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper. To
the far right the boys could see and long for the ropes under the
tower, in which the bell-ringers of his day, as of Bunyan's not long
before, delighted. The preaching of the time did nothing more for young
Carey than for the rest of England and Scotland, whom the parish church
had not driven into dissent or secession. But he could not help
knowing the Prayer-Book, and especially its psalms and lessons, and he
was duly confirmed. The family training, too, was exceptionally
scriptural, though not evangelical. "I had many stirrings of mind
occasioned by being often obliged to read books of a religious
character; and, having been accustomed from my infancy to read the
Scriptures, I had a considerable acquaintance therewith, especially
with the historical parts." The first result was to make him despise
dissenters. But, undoubtedly, this eldest son of the schoolmaster and
the clerk of the parish had at fourteen received an education from
parents, nature, and books which, with his habits of observation, love
of reading, and perseverance, made him better instructed than most boys
of fourteen far above the peasant class to which he belonged.

Buried in this obscure village in the dullest period of the dullest of
all centuries, the boy had no better prospect before him than that of a
weaver or labourer, or possibly a schoolmaster like one of his uncles
in the neighbouring town of Towcester. When twelve years of age, with
his uncle there, he might have formed one of the crowd which listened
to John Wesley, who, in 1773 and then aged seventy, visited the
prosperous posting town. Paulerspury could indeed boast of one son,
Edward Bernard, D.D., who, two centuries before, had made for himself a
name in Oxford, where he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy. But
Carey was not a Sco