To work upon the faith of her young pupil, Esmond’s kind mistress sent to the library of her father the Dean, who had been distinguished in the disputes of the late king’s reign; and, an old soldier now, had hung up his weapons of controversy.  These he took down from his shelves willingly for young Esmond, whom he benefited by his own personal advice and instruction.  It did not require much persuasion to induce the boy to worship with his beloved mistress.  And the good old nonjuring Dean flattered himself with a conversion which, in truth, was owing to a much gentler and fairer persuader.

Under her ladyship’s kind eyes (my lord’s being sealed in sleep pretty generally), Esmond read many volumes of the works of the famous British Divines of the last age, and was familiar with Wake and Sherlock, with Stillingfleet and Patrick.  His mistress never tired to listen or to read, to pursue the texts with fond comments, to urge those points which her fancy dwelt on most, or her reason deemed most important.  Since the death of her father the Dean, this lady hath admitted a certain latitude of theological reading which her orthodox father would never have allowed; his favorite writers appealing more to reason and antiquity than to the passions or imaginations of their readers, so that the works of Bishop Taylor, nay, those of Mr. Baxter and Mr. Law, have in reality found more favor with my Lady Castlewood than the severer volumes of our great English schoolmen.

In later life, at the University, Esmond reopened the controversy, and pursued it in a very different manner, when his patrons had determined for him that he was to embrace the ecclesiastical life.  But though his mistress’s heart was in this calling, his own never was much.  After that first fervor of simple devotion, which his beloved Jesuit priest had inspired in him, speculative theology took but little hold upon the young man’s mind.  When his early credulity was disturbed, and his saints and virgins taken out of his worship, to rank little higher than the divinities of Olympus, his belief became acquiescence rather than ardor; and he made his mind up to assume the cassock and bands, as another man does to wear a breastplate and jack-boots, or to mount a merchant’s desk, for a livelihood, and from obedience and necessity, rather than from choice.  There were scores of such men in Mr. Esmond’s time at the universities, who were going to the church with no better calling than his.

When Thomas Tusher was gone, a feeling of no small depression and disquiet fell upon young Esmond, of which, though he did not complain, his kind mistress must have divined the cause:  for soon after she showed not only that she understood the reason of Harry’s melancholy, but could provide a remedy for it.  Her habit was thus to watch, unobservedly, those to whom duty or affection bound her, and to prevent their designs, or to fulfil them, when she had the power.  It was this lady’s disposition to