“By his frugality and good management he keeps the wolf from the door, as we say; and if he advances a little in the world it is owing more to his own care than to anything else he has to rely upon.  I don’t find his inclination in running after further preferment.  He is settled among the people that are happy among themselves, and lives in the greatest unanimity and friendship with them; and, I believe, the minister and people are exceedingly satisfied with each other:  and indeed, how should they be dissatisfied, when they have a person of so much worth and probity for their pastor?  A man who for his candour and meekness, his sober, chaste, and virtuous conversation, his soundness in principle and practice, is an ornament to his profession and an honour to the country he is in; and bear with me if I say, the plainness of his dress, the sanctity of his manners, the simplicity of his doctrine, and the vehemence of his expression, have a sort of resemblance to the pure practice of primitive Christianity.”

The income of his chapelry was the munificent sum of L17 10 s.  He reared and educated a numerous family of twelve children.  Every Sunday he entertained those members of his congregation who came from a distance, taught the village school, acted as scrivener and lawyer for the district, farmed, and helped his neighbours in haymaking and sheep-shearing, spun cloth, studied natural history, and, in spite of all this, was throughout a devoted and earnest parish priest.  He was certainly entitled to his epithet “the Wonderful.”

Goldsmith has given us a charming picture of an old-world parson in his Vicar of Wakefield, and Fielding sketches a no less worthy cleric in his portrait of the Rev. Abraham Adams in his Joseph Andrews.  As a companion picture he drew the character of the pig-keeping Parson Trulliber, no scandalous cleric, though he cared more for his cows and pigs than he did for his parishioners.

“Hawks should not peck out hawks’ e’en,” and parsons should not scoff at their fellows; yet Crabbe was a little unkind in his description of country parsons, though he could say little against the character of his vicar.

     “Our Priest was cheerful and in season gay;
     His frequent visits seldom fail’d to please;
     Easy himself, he sought his neighbour’s ease.

* * * * *

     Simple he was, and loved the simple truth,
     Yet had some useful cunning from his youth;
     A cunning never to dishonour lent,
     And rather for defence than conquest meant;
     ’Twas fear of power, with some desire to rise,
     But not enough to make him enemies;
     He ever aim’d to please; and to offend
     Was ever cautious; for he sought a friend. 
     Fiddling and fishing were his arts, at times
     He alter’d sermons, and he aimed at rhymes;
     And his fair friends, not yet intent on cards,