who by his snivelling enunciation of the responses and his nasal drawlings of the A—­mens, was sure to provoke the risibility of his hearers.  Mr. Young’s own clerk was, however, a very worthy man, of such lofty aspirations and of such blameless purity of life, that in making him Nature made the very ideal of a village clerk and schoolmaster, and then “broke the mould.”  His grave yet kindly countenance, his well-proportioned limbs encased in breeches and gaiters of corded kerseymere, and the natural dignity of his carriage, combined “to give the world assurance of” a bishop rather than a clerk.  It needed familiarity with his inner life to know how much simpleness of purpose and simplicity of mind and contentment and piety lay hid under a pompous exterior and a phraseology somewhat stilted.

His name was William Hinton, and he dwelt in a small whitewashed cottage which, by virtue of his situation as schoolmaster, he enjoyed rent free.  It stood in the heart of a small but well-stocked kitchen garden.  His salary was L40 per annum, and on this, with perhaps L5 a year more derived from church fees, he brought up five children in the greatest respectability, all of whom did well in life.  They regarded their father with absolute veneration.  By the side of the labourer who only knew what he had taught him, or of the farmer who knew less, he was a giant among pygmies—­a Triton among minnows.

When Mr. Young went to the village, with the exception of a Bible, a Prayer Book, a random tract or two, and a Moore’s Almanac, there was scarcely a book to be found in it.  The rector kindly allowed his clerk the run of his well-stocked library.  Hinton devoured the books greedily.  So receptive and imitative was his intellect that his conversation, his deportment, even his spirit, became imbued with the individuality of the author whose writings he had been studying.  After reading Dr. Johnson’s works his conversation became sententious and dogmatic. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters produced an airiness and jauntiness that were quite foreign to his nature.  His favourite authors were Jeremy Taylor, Bacon, and Milton.  After many months reverential communion with these Goliaths of literature he became pensive and contemplative, and his manner more chastened and severe.  The secluded village in which he dwelt had been his birthplace, and there he remained to the day of his death.  He knew nothing of the outer world, and the rector found his intercourse with a man so original, fresh, and untainted a real pleasure.  He was physically timid, and the account of a voyage across the Channel or a journey by coach filled him with dread.  One day he said to Mr. Young, “Am I, reverend sir, to understand that you voluntarily trust your perishable body to the outside of a vehicle, of the soundness of which you know nothing, and suffer yourself to be drawn to and fro by four strange animals, of whose temper you are ignorant, and are willing to be driven by a coachman