SOURCE: "Squire and Parson," in The English Country Parson, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1947, pp. 204-14.

In the following excerpt, Addison relies on the memories of the Reverend F. G. S. Nicolle to discuss the habits and personality of Baring-Gould.

Few men can have had the good things of this life bestowed on them more bountifully than Sabine Baring-Gould, scholar, squire, and parson. His was indeed a goodly heritage. As we look back from the middle of this war-harassed twentieth century on those ninety years of peaceful, abounding activity, we wonder whether so full a life had ever been possible for a village parson before or will ever be possible again. Born at Exeter in January 1834, when William IV was king, he lived through the rising hopes and achievements of Victorian and Edwardian England and died quietly in January 1924, before the disruption of the society he had known...