visage of the
Bishop himself. "Ladies," he said, blandly, "these grounds are private,
as the gate through which you have just passed may in part have
suggested to you. The turn to the left will bring you in due time to the
stables. If you should go straight on you will presently reach the
house. Should you inspect the house, may I mention to you that in one of
the bedrooms is an invalid? You will perhaps pardon my servants if they
do not show you that. Good morning."

But my boyish appreciation of the Bishop's mundane qualities was equaled
by my faith in the sacrosanctity of his office. I never for a moment
doubted that men like Henry of Exeter were channels through which the
Christian priesthood received those miraculous powers by their exercise
of which alone it was possible for the ordinary sinner to be rescued
from eternal torment. Of the structural doctrines of theology which were
then the shibboleths of English Churchmanship generally, I never
entertained a doubt. That the universe was created in the inside of a
week four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ, and that
every word of the Bible was supernaturally dictated to the writer, were
to me facts as certain as the fact that the ear this globular or that
the date of the battle of Hastings was 1066. They belonged to the same
order of things as the "two nations"; and the attempts of certain
persons to discredit the former and to disturb the reciprocal relations
of the latter represented for me a mood so blasphemous and absurd as not
to be worthy of a serious man's attention.

And yet in certain ways by the time I was twelve years old I was
something of a revolutionary myself. Like the majority of healthy boys,
I had tastes for riding and shooting, and to such things as rooks and
rabbits my rifle was as formidable as most boys could desire. But long
before I was conscious of any passion for sport I found myself beset by
another, which was very much more insistent--namely, a passion for
literary composition--I cannot say a taste for writing, for I dictated
verses to the nursery-maids before I could hold a pen. As soon as I was
able to read I came across the works of Fielding, whose style I
endeavored to imitate in a series of lengthy novels, deriving as I did
so a precocious sense of manhood from the eighteenth-century oaths with
which I garnished the conversation of my characters. My ambitions,
however, as a writer of fiction were on the whole less