Specimens of Berridge’s odd style and occasionally bad taste have already been given in connection with Lady Huntingdon, and need not here be multiplied.  It was no doubt questionable propriety to say that ‘nature lost her legs in paradise, and has not found them since,’ or that ’an angel might preach such doctrine as was commonly preached till his wings dropped off without doing any good,’ or to tell us that ’he once went to Jesus as a coxcomb and gave himself fine airs.’  But it is far more easy to laugh at and to criticise the foibles of the good man than to imitate his devotedness to his Masters service, and the moral courage which enabled him to exchange the dignified position and learned leisure of a University don for the harassing life and despised position of a Methodist preacher—­for so the Vicar of Everton would have been termed in his own day.

The Evangelical revival drew within the sphere of its influence men of the most opposite characters.  It would be difficult to conceive a more complete contrast than that which William Romaine (1714-1795) presented to the two worthies last mentioned.  Grave, severe, self-restrained, and, except to those who knew him intimately, somewhat repellent in manners.  Romaine would have been quite unfitted for the work which Grimshaw and Berridge, in spite—­or, shall we say, in consequence?—­of their boisterous bonhomie and occasionally ill-timed jocularity were able to do.  The farmers and working men of Haworth or Everton would assuredly have gone to sleep under his preaching, or stayed away from church altogether.  One can scarcely fancy Romaine itinerating at all; but if he had done so, the bleak moors of Yorkshire or the cottage homes of Bedfordshire would not have been suitable spheres for his labours.  But where he was, he was the right man in the right place.  Among the grave and decorous citizens who attended the city churches, and among the educated congregations who flocked to hear him at St. George’s, Hanover Square, Romaine was appreciated.  Both in his character and in his writings Romaine approached more nearly than any of the so-called Puritans of his day to the typical Puritan of the seventeenth century.  He was like one born out of due time.  One can fancy him more at home with Flavel, Howe, and Baxter than with Whitefield, Berridge, and Grimshaw.  Did we not know its date, we might have imagined that the ‘Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith’ was written a hundred years before it actually was.  Its very style and language were archaic in the eighteenth century, Romaine, indeed, thoroughly won the sympathy of the generation in which he lived, or at any rate of the school to which he belonged.  But it was a work of time.  He was at Oxford at the time of the rise of Methodism, but appears to have held no communication with its promoters.  In another respect he differed from almost all the Evangelicals.  There was apparently no transition, either abrupt or gradual, in his views.  The only change which we