privations, and by the doors of the reporters' gallery. Now reporting is become a profession of itself, at which men of moderate ambition have been content to stop. Now daily journalism is a trade to which barristers are specially recommended, not only by their personal tastes and by their mental training, but by the special circumstance of their being located in the Inns of Court, within easy call of the leading newspaper offices. Through successful leader-writing political relations may be formed, and secretaryships to prominent and powerful politicians are the stepping-stones to permanent and lucrative appointments. There are private secretaryships of all sorts, from that to the Indian Viceroy, which virtually means the deputy-governorship of our Eastern empire-from that to a friendly first minister of the Crown, which means the pick of eligible semi-sinecures down to the service of such a patriotic and philanthropic M.P. as was declined after an interview by Nicholas Nickleby. But the great drawback to even the most tempting of the byways by which a man may get on is their precariousness. You may be made a magistrate in partibus among the Zulus or the Kaffirs; you may drop into a lucrative land-agency, monarch of all about you for nine months in the year, with the best of hunting, shooting, and fishing; you may be sent

abroad as superintendent of a mine, crushing its thousands of tons of profitable ore every month, and employing its hundreds of whites and browns. But colonial appointments are cut down, or the mine may be flooded, or you may quarrel with a liberal employer or be bereaved of him: then in middle age, with a wife and children and expensive habits, you are suddenly landed in a cul-de-sac, and have to try luck with small hope of such another chance. Nor can we conceive a more melancholy state of humiliation than being suddenly reduced from opulent independence to stint and to scrimp, to beg and to borrow. The old-fashioned careers are still the safest, though you be fettered by crowds and grope along in the dimness; while in following strange tracks across unsurveyed country, one is apt to be led astray by the flickering Wills-o'-the-wisp, and to be bogged in some quagmire when the powers begin to fail.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE OLD AND THE NEW CLERGYMEN.

ONE of the most familiar characters in English

In

fiction is the parson; and for pictures of clergymen of all ages and classes, we need only turn to the pages of popular novelists. Fielding and Smollett, as in the romances of eighteenth-century society of our own contemporaries, the divines have had somewhat hard measure dealt them, and seldom show to great advantage. Parson Adams, among the antiquated sketches, stands out as a favourable exception; and the parson, who was emphatically a muscular Christian, flourishing his cudgel and making free with his massive fists, would scarcely be considered nowadays a creditable sample of the cloth. No doubt the novelist generally selects those imaginary idiosyncrasies in which contrasts and contradictions of character may give the most picturesque effects. Yet I have the author's personal authority for assert

ing that the Devonshire parsons in 'The Maid of Sker' were actually portraits, and as true to the life as the family chaplain in 'Dorothy Forster,' who had already found his prototype in Sampson of The Virginians.' They lived in an atmosphere of loose social morality; and preferment from the highest places to the lowest went, for the most part, by something worse than mere favour. It may be taken for granted. that well-informed novelists, in the interests of their art, have rather exaggerated the virtues and redeeming features of their reverent heroes. A veritable "chaplain of the fleet" must surely have been more utterly degraded by his scandalous traffic in what was sacred, and by nightly symposia in "The Rules "The Rules" with dissipated associates. A Sampson broken in to fetch and to carry, and to pander to the vices of unscrupulous patrons, could hardly have been capable of sublimities of self-sacrifice, when one of his honourable principals came to pecuniary grief. A courtly Bishop Tusher, who had won the lawn-sleeves by stifling his conscience in suave hypocrisy, strikes us as more unpleasantly true to the life. In those days, when a younger son or a near kinsman did not drop naturally into a family living, the frequent path to preferment was a disreputable marriage. The Church, with many virtuous and God-fearing

divines, was nevertheless so rotten that it was ripe for reformation. The end of the eighteenth century saw a happy change, which must be attributed in great measure to the Wesleyan revival. There was a shaking of the bones and an awakening to a sense of the proprieties under the influence of earnest and impassioned preachers. Not only did clerical manners begin to mend, but the pugnacious instincts of the more energetic churchmen were excited by the popularity of dissenting chapels, and the fervour of those itinerant orators who denounced the Laodiceans and their works. When a Dinah drew a congregation on the village - green, the good but Gallio - like Mr Irwine would feel the spur of emulation, and possibly be troubled by serious prickings of conscience. Patrons of livings paid a greater regard to appearances; parsons threw a cloak over their foibles. Yet the conversion of the clergy as a body was necessarily very gradual, since their sympathetic parishioners were generally tolerant. They took kindly to a pastor who, like worthy Mr Gilfil in the Scenes of Clerical Life,' smoked long pipes and preached short sermons. Mrs Patten, well persuaded that she had never been a sinner, resented the visits of the well-meaning Mr Barton, because he would insist on talking to her of "her need o' mercy."