What is a fat living compared to converting a hundred thousand heathens by a single sermon?  What is a scholarship at Trinity by the side of a crown of martyrdom, with angels awaiting you as your head is taken off?  Could your master at school sail over the Thames on his gown?  Have you statues in your church that can bleed, speak, walk, and cry?  My good Tommy, in dear Father Holt’s church these things take place every day.  You know Saint Philip of the Willows appeared to Lord Castlewood, and caused him to turn to the one true church.  No saints ever come to you.”  And Harry Esmond, because of his promise to Father Holt, hiding away these treasures of faith from T. Tusher, delivered himself of them nevertheless simply to Father Holt; who stroked his head, smiled at him with his inscrutable look, and told him that he did well to meditate on these great things, and not to talk of them except under direction.

CHAPTER IV.

I am placed under A popish priest and bred to that
religion.—­Viscountess Castlewood.

Had time enough been given, and his childish inclinations been properly nurtured, Harry Esmond had been a Jesuit priest ere he was a dozen years older, and might have finished his days a martyr in China or a victim on Tower Hill:  for, in the few months they spent together at Castlewood, Mr. Holt obtained an entire mastery over the boy’s intellect and affections; and had brought him to think, as indeed Father Holt thought with all his heart too, that no life was so noble, no death so desirable, as that which many brethren of his famous order were ready to undergo.  By love, by a brightness of wit and good-humor that charmed all, by an authority which he knew how to assume, by a mystery and silence about him which increased the child’s reverence for him, he won Harry’s absolute fealty, and would have kept it, doubtless, if schemes greater and more important than a poor little boy’s admission into orders had not called him away.

After being at home for a few months in tranquillity (if theirs might be called tranquillity, which was, in truth, a constant bickering), my lord and lady left the country for London, taking their director with them:  and his little pupil scarce ever shed more bitter tears in his life than he did for nights after the first parting with his dear friend, as he lay in the lonely chamber next to that which the Father used to occupy.  He and a few domestics were left as the only tenants of the great house:  and, though Harry sedulously did all the tasks which the Father set him, he had many hours unoccupied, and read in the library, and bewildered his little brains with the great books he found there.