duty and passed away, and left no memories behind except in the tender recollections of a few simple-minded folk.  There were few local newspapers in those days to tell their virtues, to print their sermons or their speeches at the opening of bazaars or flower-shows.  They did their duty and passed away and were forgotten; while the parsons, like the wretch Chowne of the Maid of Sker, live on in anecdote, and grave folk shake their heads and think that the times must have been very bad, and the clergy a disgrace to their cloth.  As with the clerk, so with his master; the evil that men do lives after them, the good is forgotten.  There has been a vast amount of exaggeration in the accounts that have come down to us of the faithlessness, sluggishness, idleness, and base conduct of the clergy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and perhaps a little too much boasting about the progress which our age has witnessed.

It would be an easy task to record the lives of many worthy country clergymen of the much-abused Hanoverian period, who were exemplary parish priests, pious, laborious, and beloved.  In recording the eccentricities and lack of reverence of many clerics and their faithful servitors, it is well to remember the many bright lights that shone like lamps in a dark place.

It would be a difficult task to write a history of our parish priesthood, for reasons which have already been stated, and such a labour is beyond our present purpose.  But it may be well to record a few of the observations which contemporary writers have made upon the parsons of their day in order to show that they were by no means a set of careless, disreputable, and unworthy men.

During the greater part of the eighteenth century there lived at Seathwaite, Lancashire, as curate, the famous Robert Walker, styled “the Wonderful,” “a man singular for his temperance, industry, and integrity,” as the parish register records.

Wordsworth alludes to him in his eighteenth sonnet on Durdon as a worthy compeer of the country parson of Chaucer, and in the seventh book of the Excursion an abstract of his character is given: 

     “A priest abides before whose lips such doubts
     Fall to the ground, as in those days
     When this low pile a gospel preacher knew
     Whose good works formed an endless retinue;
     A pastor such as Chaucer’s verse portrays,
     Such as the heaven-taught skill of Herbert drew,
     And tender Goldsmith crown’d with deathless praise.”

The poet also gives a short memoir of the Wonderful Walker.  In this occurs the following extract from a letter dated 1775: