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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In "From Paddington to Penzance," Charles G. Harper takes readers on an evocative journey through the English countryside, utilizing a rich, descriptive prose style that captures both the beauty and the peculiarities of the landscapes traversed by the railroad. Harper's narrative weaves together a vivid tableau of sights, sounds, and cultural reflections from Paddington Station to the shores of Penzance, thoughtfully placing the traveler within the larger context of 19th-century England's social and industrial transformations. This work stands apart as both a travelogue and a social commentary, characterized by Harper's keen observational wit and his deep affection for the places he describes, which illuminate the intricate relationship between the railways and the burgeoning modern identity of England. Charles G. Harper was a prominent figure in the late Victorian literary scene, known not only for his travel writing but also for his illustrations and dedication to the promotion of railway travel. His experiences as a traveler and his fascination with the varied English landscapes significantly informed his writing. Harper's detailed observations reflect a profound appreciation for the artistry of the Victorian era, showcasing a blend of nostalgia and innovation that invites readers to see the world through his eyes. I highly recommend "From Paddington to Penzance" to anyone interested in the interplay between travel and cultural identity in England's history. Harper's work offers both a delightful investigative trip through familiar settings and a compelling narrative that enriches one'Äôs understanding of a transformative period in British history. This book is an essential read for historians, travelers, and literary enthusiasts alike.
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From Paddington to Penzance
Table of Contents
PREFACE
Before I set about the overhauling of my notes made on this tour—afoot, afloat, awheel—from London to Land’s End, I confided to an old friend my intention of publishing an account of these wanderings. Now, no one has such a mean idea of one’s capacities as an old friend, and so I was by no means surprised when he flouted my project. I have known the man for many years; and as the depth of an old friend’s scorn deepens with time, you may guess how profound by now is his distrust of my powers.
“Better hadn’t,” said he.
“And why not?” said I.
“See how often it has been done,” he replied. “Why should you do it again, after Elihu Burritt, after Walter White, and L’Estrange, and those others who have wearied us so often with their dull records of uneventful days?”
“I do it,” I said, “for the reason that poets write poetry, because I must. Out upon your Burritts and the rest of them; I don’t know them, and don’t want to—yet. When the book is finished, then they shall be looked up for the sake of comparison; at present, I keep an open mind on the subject.”
And I kept it until to-day. I have just returned from a day with these authors at the British Museum, and I feel weary. Probably most of them are dead by this time, as dead as their books, and nothing I say now can do them any harm; so let me speak my mind.
First I dipped into the pages of that solemn Yankee prig, Burritt, and presently became bogged in stodgy descriptions of agriculture, and long-drawn parallels between English and American husbandry. Stumbling out of these sloughs, one comes headlong upon that true republican’s awkward raptures over titled aristocracy. The rest is all a welter of cheap facts and interjectional essays in the obvious.
Then I essayed upon Walter White’s “Londoners Walk to the Land’s End”—horribly informative, and with an appalling poverty of epithet. This dreadful tourist was used (he says) to sing and recite to the rustics whom he met.
“’Tis a dry day, master,” say the thirsty countrymen to him; while he, heedless of their artful formula, calls not for the flowing bowl, but strikes an attitude, and recites to them a ballad of Macaulay’s!
And yet those poor men, robbed of their beer, applauded (says our author), and, like Oliver Twist, asked for more.
Then an American coach-party had driven over part of our route, following the example of “An American Four-in-Hand in Britain,” by Citizen Carnegie. Indeed, we easily recognise the Citizen again, under the name of Mæcenas, among this party, which produced the “Chronicle of the Coach.”
The same Americanese pervades both books; the same patronage of John Bull, and the same laudation of those States, is common to them; but for choice, the Citizen’s own book is in the viler taste. Both jig through their pages to an abominable “charivari” of their own composing, an amalgam of “Yankee Doodle” and the “Marseillaise,” one with (renegade Scot!) a bagpipe “obbligato.”
They anticipate the time when we shall be blessed with a Republic after the model of their own adopted country; the Citizen (I think) commonly wears a cap of liberty for headgear, and a Stars and Stripes for shirt. This last may possibly be an error of mine. But at any rate I should like to see him tucking in the tails of such a star-spangled banner.
These were the works which were to forbid a newer effort at a book aiming at the same destination, but proceeding by an independent route, and (as it chanced) written upon different lines—written with what I take to be a care rather for personal impressions than for guide-book history.
We won to the West by no known route, but followed the inclinations of irresponsible tourists, with a strong disinclination for martyrdom on dusty highways and in uninteresting places. This, too, is explanatory of our taking the train at certain points and our long lingering at others. If, unwittingly or by intent, I have here or there in these pages dropped into history, I beg your pardon, I’m sure; for all I intended was to show you personal impressions in two media, pictures and prose.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
London, October 1893.
From Paddington to Penzance
I.
There were two of us: myself, the narrator, the artist-journalist of these truthful pages, and my sole companion, the Wreck. Why I call him by this unlovely title is our own private business, our exclusive bone of contention; not for untold gold would I disclose the identity of that man, the irresponsible, the nerveless, mute, inglorious fellow-wayfarer in this record of a summer’s tour. Let him, nameless save by epithet, go down with this book to a more or less extended posterity. But I give you some slight portraiture of him, so that you shall see he was not so very ill-favoured a Wreck, at any rate.
This man, willing to be convinced of the pleasure and the healthful profit of touring afoot, yet loth to try so grand a specific for varied ills, delayed long and faltered much between yea and nay ere he was finally pledged to the trip; but a time for decision comes at last, even to the most vacillating, and at length we set out together on this leisured tour.
It was time. When we left London the spirit of the silly season roamed abroad, and made men mad: the novelists were explaining diffusely in the columns of the public press why they wrote no plays; the playwrights were giving the retort discourteous (coram publico) to the effect that the novelists had all the will but didn’t know how, and the factions between them made any amount of copy for the enterprising editor who looked on and, so to speak, winked the other eye while the combatants contended. Unsuccessful Parliamentary candidates were counting the cost of their electoral struggles, and muttering melodramatic prophecies of “a time will come”; the eager journalist wandered about Fleet Street, seeking news and finding none, for the Building Societies had not yet begun to collapse; and the chiefest streets of town were “up.”
Those happy men, the layers of wood-paving, had created a delightful Rus in Urbe of their own in Piccadilly, and enjoyed a prolonged sojourn amid such piney odours as Bournemouth itself never knew: here was health-giving balsam for them that had no cash to spend in holiday-making! But indeed almost every one had left town; only an unimportant residuum of some four millions remained, and wide-eyed emaciated cats howled dismally in deserted areas of the West End, while evening breezes blew stuffily across the Parks and set the Londoner sighing for purer air where blacks were not, nor the shouting of the streets annoyed the ear.
If you take the reduced ordnance map of England, and rule a straight line upon it from Paddington to Penzance and the Land’s End, you will find that the distance by this arbitrary measurement is some 265 miles, and that the line passes through or near Staines, Basingstoke, Salisbury, Exeter, Truro, and Redruth, to Penzance and Sennen Cove, by Penwithstart, touching the sea at three places en route—Fowey, Par, and Charlestown, neighbouring towns in Cornwall.
The most direct coach-road is given by Cary, of the New Itinerary, as 297 miles 5 furlongs. It was measured from Hyde Park Corner, and went through Brentford, Hounslow, Staines, Egham, Bagshot, Hartford Bridge, Basingstoke, Whitchurch, Andover, Salisbury, Blandford, Dorchester, Bridport, Axminster, Honiton, Exeter, Crockernwell, Okehampton, Launceston, Bodmin, Redruth, Pool, Camborne, Hayle River, and Crowlas. The route, it will be seen from this breathless excerpt, was commendably direct, thirty-two miles only being added by way of deviation from the measured map. On this road, so far as Exeter at least, much might be gleaned of moving interest in matters of coaching times, but beyond the Ever Faithful City no first-class nor very continuous service seems to have been maintained: the Royal Mail, Defiance, Regulator, Traveller, Celerity, and Post coaches finding little custom farther west.
I keep all love for high-roads for those times (rare indeed) when I go a-wheel on cycles; it is better to fare by lanes and by-ways when you go afoot, and then to please yourself as to your route, caring little for a consistent line of march: consistency is the bugbear of little minds. So swayed by impulse and circumstances were we, that I should indeed fear to set about the computation of mileage in this our journey from East to West: for our somewhat involved course, your attention, dear reader, is invited to the map.
We packed our knapsacks overnight, and the next morning
we had taken a hansom from Paddington, bound for Westminster Bridge, thence to voyage by steamer to Richmond.
Set down at Westminster Pier, we waited for the Richmond boat, while the growls and grumblings of the streets sounded loudly from the Bridge overhead, and mingled with the hoarse thunder of trains crossing the abominable squat cylinders and giant trellis-work that go to make the railway-bridge of Charing Cross.
I am not going to weary you with a description of how we slowly paddled up stream in the Richmond boat, past the Houses of Parliament on one hand, and Lambeth Palace and Doulton’s on the other; under Vauxhall and other London bridges, into suburban reaches, the shoals of Kew, and past the dirty town of Brentford (noted for possessing the ugliest parish church in all England), until at length we came off the boat at Richmond town. No: if I were to commence with this I know not where I should stop, and so, perhaps, the best way to treat the voyage would be by a masterly display of “reserved force.” Assume, then, that we are at length (for this steamboat journey is an affair of considerable time though few miles)—at length arrived at Richmond.
II.
What semi-suburb so pleasant as Richmond, quite unspoilable, though jerry-buildings and shoddy hotels conspire to oust its old-world air; though the Terrace elms are doomed; though on Saturdays and Sundays of summer, Halberts and Arrys, Halices and Hemmers, crowd George Street, and shout and sing and exchange hats, and row upon the river, where, from the bridge, you may see them waving their sculls windmill fashion, and colliding, one boat with another, so that, their little hour upon the water being finished, the boatowners levy extra charges for scraped paint and broken scull-blades.
How many towns or neighbourhoods can show such courtly concourse of old: kings and queens, statesmen, nobles, poets, and wits? Palaces so many and various have been builded here, that the historian’s brain reels with the reading of them: eulogistic verse, blank and rhymed, has been written by the yard, on place and people, chiefly by eighteenth century poets, who then thronged the banks of Thames and constituted themselves, virtually, a Mutual Admiration Society. Thomson wrote and died here; near by, Gay, protected by a Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, lapped milk, wrote metrical fables, grew sleek, and presently died; Cowley, Pope, and a host of others contributed to the flood of verse, commonly in such journalistic tricklings as these:—
Literary ladies, and blue-stockings too, have thronged Richmond, and to this day there stands on the Green a row of charming old houses, fronted with gardens and decaying wrought-iron gates, called Maid of Honour Row, where were lodged such maids of rank whom interest or favour could admit to that honoured, though hard-worked and thankless guild. Madame D’Arblay, who, as Fanny Burney, was a domestic martyr to the royal household, has shown us how empty was the title and painful the place of “Maid of Honour.”
But despite royal associations, perhaps, indeed, on account of them, the Richmond of to-day is Radical: it has been distinguished, or notorious, for its Radical tradesmen any time these last hundred and forty years, from the time when the institution of “Tea and shrimps, 9d.” may be said to date. Tea, by itself, is not distinctly Radical, but I confess I see the germs of Republicanism in shrimps, and I should not be surprised at hearing of red-capped revolts originating at any of those places—Herne Bay, Margate, Ramsgate, Greenwich, Gravesend, Kew, and Richmond, where the shrimp is (so to speak) rampant.
Time was, indeed, when a “dish of tea” was distinctly exclusive and aristocratic: it has been, with the constant reductions of duty, rendered less and less respectable. The first step in its downward career was taken when the “dish” was substituted for the “cup,” and its final degradation is reached in the company of the unholy shrimp. The “cup of coffee and two slices” of the early morning coffee-stall is vulgar, but seems not to sound the depths of the other institution.
Let Chancellors of the Exchequer be warned ere it is yet too late; with the disappearance of the last halfpenny of the duty upon tea will come the final crash. Tea and shrimps will be obtainable for sixpence, and monarchy will no longer rule the land; perchance Chancellors of the Exchequer themselves will be obsolete and dishonoured officers of State. Perhaps, too, in some far distant period, Richmond will succeed in obtaining a water supply. Now she stands on one of the charmingest reaches of Thames, and yet, within constant sight of his silver flood, drinkable water is hardly come by in Richmond households. This is the penalty (or one of them) of popularity; the wells that were all-sufficient for Richmond of the past do not suffice for the population of to-day, which has gained her a charter of incorporation, and lost her an aristocratic prestige. The rateable value of Richmond must be very large indeed, but what does it avail when hundreds of thousands of pounds are continually being spent in fruitless borings for water? Richmond folk, nowadays, have all of them a species of hydrophobia, induced by a tax of too many pence in the pound for the water rate. Uneasy sits the Mayor, and the way of the Council is hard.
Thames, too, has been shockingly inclined to run dry at Richmond, so that there is building, even now, a lock that is to supersede that of Teddington in its present fame of largest and lowest on the river.
We looked into Richmond church and noted its many tablets to bygone actors and actresses, chief among them Edmund Kean, who died at the theatre here, so recently rebuilt. Then we hied to a restaurant and lunched, and partook (as in duty bound) of those cakes peculiar to the town. Then we set forth upon our walk.
III.
To continue on the highroad that leads out of populous Richmond toward the “Star and Garter,” is to find one’s self presently surrounded with rustic sights and sounds altogether unexpected of the stranger in these gates. To take the lower road is to come directly into Petersham, wearing, even in these days, an air of retirement and a smack of the eighteenth century, despite its close neighbourhood to the Richmond of District Railways and suburban aspects.
The little church of Petersham is interesting despite (perhaps on account of) its bastard architecture and singular plan, but the feature that gives distinction is its cupola-covered bell turret, quaintly designed and louvre-boarded. The interior is small and cramped, and crowded with monuments. Among these the most interesting, so it seemed to us, was that to the memory of Captain George Vancouver, whose name is perpetuated in the christening of Vancouver Island.
Others of some note, very great personages in their day, but now half-forgotten, are buried in the churchyard and have weighty monuments within the church. Among these are an Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, a vice-admiral, a serjeant-at-law, Lauderdales, Tollemaches, and several dames and knights of high degree. Perhaps more interesting still, Mortimer Collins, author of, among other novels, that charming story, “Sweet and Twenty,” lies buried here.
And from here it is well within three miles to the little village of Ham, encircling, with its scattered cottages and mansions of stolid red brick of legitimate “Queen Anne” design, that common whose name has within the last two years been so familiar in the mouths of men. You may journey into the county’s depths and not find so quiet a spot as this out-of-the-world corner, nor one so altogether behind these bustling times. It has all the makings of the familiar type of an old English village, even to its princely manor-house. Ham House is magnificent indeed, and thereby hangs a tale.
Its occupiers have been for many generations the Earls of Dysart, whose family rose to noble rank by sufficiently curious means in the time of Charles I., an era when the peerage was reinforced by methods essentially romantic and irregular. Beauty (none too strictly strait-laced) secured titles for its bar-sinistered descendants in those times: in our own it is commonly Beer that performs the same kindly office.
The first Earl of Dysart had in his time fulfilled the painful post of “whipping-boy”—a species of human scapegoat—to his sacred Majesty, and by his stripes was his preferment earned.
I am told that it is not to be supposed this house and manor are the property of the Dysarts: they pay and have paid, time almost out of mind, an annual rent into the Court of Chancery for the benefit of the lost owners.
“But yet,” said my informant at Ham—the strenuous upholder of public rights in that notorious Ham Common prosecution,—“but yet, although this is their only local status, the Dysart Trustees have endeavoured, from time to time, to assume greater rights over Ham Common and public rights-of-way, than even might be claimed by the veritable lord of the manor.”
In the early part of 1891, the Trustees placed notice-boards at different points of the Common, setting forth the pains and penalties and nameless punishments that would be incurred by any who should cut turf or cart gravel, exceeding in this act (it seems) their rights, even had they possessed the title, for there is extant a deed executed by Charles I., in favour of the people of Ham, giving the Common to their use for ever.
Fortunately there was sufficient public spirit in Ham for the resisting of illegal encroachments, and eventually the notice-boards were sawn down by village Hampdens. Thereupon followed a prosecution at the instance of the Dysart Trustees, with the result that the defendants were all triumphantly acquitted.
It were indeed a pity had this, one of the largest and most beautiful commons near London, been gradually drawn within the control of family trustees. It is now a breezy open space of some seventy-eight acres, stretching away from Richmond Park to near Teddington, and pleasingly wild with gorse and sandpits and ancient elms.
Here, almost to where the Kingston road bisects the Common, the avenue leading to Ham House stretches its aisle of greenery, its length nearly half-a-mile. To pursue this walk to the wrought-iron gates of the House is to be assured of interest. Erected in the early years of the seventeenth century, it remains a splendid specimen of building ere yet the day of contracts had set in. The red-brick front faces toward the river, and includes a spacious courtyard in whose centre is placed a semi-recumbent stone figure of Thames with flowing urn. Along the whole extensive frontage of the House, placed in niches, runs a series of busts, cast in lead and painted to resemble stone—a quaint conceit.
But it is not only the splendour of design and execution that renders Ham House so interesting. It was, in the time of Charles II., a meeting-place of the notorious Cabal—that quintette of unscrupulous Ministers of State whose doings were a shame to their country. Here they plotted together, and under this roof the liberties of the lieges were schemed away. Those were stirring times at Ham. Now the place wears almost a deserted look. The courtyard is grass-grown between the joints of its paving, and it is many years since the massive iron gates enclosing the grounds were used. It seems to have been lonely and decayed, even in Horace Walpole’s time. He says, “Every minute I expected to see ghosts sweeping by—ghosts that I would not give sixpence to see—Lauderdales, Tollemaches, and Maitlands.” For my part I think I would give a great many sixpences not to see them, either by night or by day, whether or not they carried their heads in the place where heads should be, or under their arms, an exceedingly uncomfortable position, even for ghosts, one would think. I have not that horrid itching (which I suppose characterises the membership of the Psychical Research Society) for the society of wraiths and bogeys, and hold ghosts, apparitions, spooks, and spunkies of every kind in a holy horror.
Therefore, we presently departed hence, and came, in course of time, to Kingston. Whether or not Kingston can be identified as the place where Cæsar crossed the ford across the Thames in pursuit of Cassivelaunus and his cerulean-dyed hordes of Britons, our ancestors, is, I take it, of not much concern nowadays, although antiquaries of our fathers’ time made a great pother about the conflicting claims of Kingston and Coway Stakes, at Shepperton, to the honour, if honour it be, of affording passage to the victorious general and his legions. I like something of more human interest than these dry bones, and, I doubt not, you who endeavour to read these pages are of the same mind; so, to make your pilgrimage through this book the lighter, I think “we had better” do like Boffin, in the presence of Mrs. Boffin—that is, “drop the subject.”
But the subject to which we must come (for no one who writes upon Kingston can avoid it) is only one remove nearer. I refer to that bone of contention (excuse the confusion of ideas) the King’s Stone, now set up and railed round in Kingston market-place, and carven with the names of the seven Saxon kings crowned here. It is this stone which has caused many pretty controversies as to whether or not it confers the name upon the town, or whether or not the place was the King’s Town.
You may, doubtless, if you are greedy of information on these heads, find all conceivable arguments set forth in the pages of the Surrey Archæological Society’s Transactions. I confess my curiosity does not carry me to such lengths. The stone is there, and, like good tourists, we accepted as so much gospel the facts set forth on it, and cared nothing as to the etymology of Kingston. Instead, we busied ourselves in hiring a boat which should take us to Reading, a journey which we estimated of a week’s duration.
Geographers, physical and political, tell us that Thames drains and waters all that great district which lies between the estuary of the Severn and the seaward sides of Essex and Kent; that it is the fertiliser of square miles innumerable, and the potent source of London’s pre-eminent rank amongst the cities of the earth. This is all very true, but the geographers take no note of Thames’ other functions; the inspiration of the poets and the painters, the enrichment of innkeepers and boat-proprietors, and the pleasuring of all them that delight in bathing and the rowing of boats. Everywhere in summer-time are boats and launches and canoes, punts and houseboats, and varieties innumerable of floating things; for when the sun shines, and the incomparable river scenery of the Thames is at its best, the heart of man desireth nothing more ardently than to lie in a boat upon the quiet mirrored depths of a shady backwater, or better still, to sit within the roaring of the weir, where the swell of the tumbling water acts like a tonic upon the spirits, and the sunlight fashions rainbows in the smoke-like suspended moisture of its foam. These are modern pleasures. For centuries the Thames has flowed through a well-peopled country, yet the delights of the river are new-found, and only in the eighteenth century did the poets’ chorus break forth in flood of praise. But to-day every one who can string rhymes makes metrical essays upon the Thames, and writers without number have written countless books upon it. From Kingston to Oxford, houseboats make populous all its banks, and the quantity of paint and acres of canvas that have been expended upon artistic efforts along its course, from Trewsbury Mead to the Nore, must ever remain without computation.
For these reasons ’tis better to say little of our journey this afternoon to Shepperton, past Hampton Court, the Cockney’s paradise, to Hampton, Sunbury, Walton, and Halliford. The river was crowded with boating parties, with those who raced and with others who paddled lazily, and when night was come the houseboats hung out their paper lanterns, all red and yellow, that streaked every little ripple with waving colour.
That night saw the first unpacking of our knapsacks, and the irrevocable disappearance of their orderly arrangement. Chaos reigned ever afterward within their ostensibly waterproof sides, for to man is not given the gift of packing up, and we were not superior to the generality of our sex. I remember perfectly the shower of things that always befell o’ nights when I came to the ordeal of unpacking my knapsack: how razors, comb and brush, pencils, and neckties and other articles dropped from it; and, I make no doubt, it was the same with the other man.
IV.
Chertsey we passed this morning, heated with rowing, but between this and Laleham we were so far fortunate as to fall in with some acquaintances on a steam-launch who took us in tow so far as Old Windsor Lock, where we cast off and proceeded alone, landing at one of the many slips by Eton Bridge.
Windsor and Eton claimed us for the remainder of the day for the due pursuance of some desultory sight-seeing, but Eton chiefly, for the sake of its College, where “her Henry,” that unhappy pious founder, Henry VI., stands in effigy in the great quadrangle, and casts a “holy shade,” according to Grey.
The “College of the Blessed Mary of Eton beside Windsor” has numbered among its scholars a goodly proportion of our famous men; and many of their names, carved on the woodwork of the schools in their schoolboy days, remain to this day. On the doorway leading from the Upper School into that place of dread, the headmaster’s room, may be seen carved, in company with other well-known names, that of “W.E. Gladstone;” and once within that apartment, your attention is drawn to the block whereon many have suffered, in less heroic wise, and by no means so tragically, as the martyrs of Tower Hill, but perhaps more painfully, for birch twigs, with the buds on them, must sting dreadfully. But these things are become historical relics rather than engines of contemporary punishment: they belong to the days of the terrific Keate and his robustious predecessors, who were wont to regard the fortiter in re as more convincing and a better preservative of discipline than the suaviter in modo.
It seems that everywhere the iron gauntlet gives way to the kid glove in our times; persuasion is to-day more a mental than a physical process. There are relics in plenty at Windsor and Eton of those times, only at Windsor these things take higher ground: there for persuasion read diplomacy in this era, where it had used to be a performance requiring the assistance of axe and chaplain. The Castle survives, its mediæval defences restored, for appearance sake, but its State apartments filled with polite furniture, dreadfully gilded and (we thought) tawdry. It makes a picture, this historic warren of kings and princes, and its Round Tower commands a glorious view, altogether an imposing range of turrets, battlements, and loopholed walls; but, alas! Henry the Eighth’s massive gateway was guarded by a constable of that singularly unromantic body—the Police, and his presence there made everything save the gas-lamps and the shop-fronts of Windsor streets seem of paste-board fashion and unreal.
The river is the proper place from whence to view the Castle: the time, early morning; for then, when the mists cling about the water, and the meadows are damp with them, that palace and stronghold, that court and tomb of royalty bulks larger than at any other time, both on sight and mind.
Thus we thought, when the early hours of the morning found us afloat again. Boveney, Monkey Island, were passed, and now arose above all the trees, the tall poplars that identify Bray to the distant view more surely than church or anything contrived at the hands of man. They range in rows, and are at once formal and touched with a delightful note of distinction. The village, too, is of the quaintest, with almshouses that should make the poverty housed within them dignified with a dignity that we who live in London’s hutches of brick and mortar, and are numbered with a plebeian number, may never know.
And at this Bray (we are told) lived that weathercock vicar, who twirled with every political wind, and by his dexterity kept his benefice and earned immortality. O most sensible Vicar of Bray: wholly admirable and right reverend exponent of expediency!
