,
moreover, loved the temporalities of the Church as temporalities.
The Church was beautiful to him because one man by interest might
have a thousand a year, while another man equally good, but without
interest, could only have a hundred. And he liked the men who had
the interest a great deal better than the men who had it not. He had
been willing to admit this poor perpetual curate, who had so long
been kept out in the cold, within the pleasant circle which was warm
with ecclesiastical good things, and the man hesitated,--because of
scruples, as the dean told him! "I always button up my pocket when I
hear of scruples," the archdeacon said.

But at last Mr. Crawley condescended to accept St Ewold's. "Reverend
and dear sir," he said in his letter.

For the personal benevolence of the offer made to me in
your letter of the ---- instant, I beg to tender you my
most grateful thanks; as also for your generous kindness
to me, in telling me of the high praise bestowed upon me
by a gentleman who is now no more,--whose character I
have esteemed and whose good opinion I value. There is,
methinks, something inexpressibly dear to me in the
recorded praise of the dead. For the further instance
of the friendship of the Dean of Barchester, I am also
thankful.

Since the receipt of your letter I have doubted much as to
my fitness for the work you have proposed to entrust to
me,--not from any feeling that the parish of St Ewold's
may be beyond my intellectual power, but because the
latter circumstances of my life have been of a nature so
strange and perplexing that they have left me somewhat
in doubt as to my own aptitude for going about among men
without giving offence and becoming a stumbling block.

Nevertheless, reverend and dear sir, if after this
confession on my part of a certain faulty demeanour with
which I know well that I am afflicted, you are still
willing to put the parish into my hands, I will accept the
charge,--instigated to do so by the advice of all whom I
have consulted on the subject; and in thus accepting it,
I hereby pledge myself to vacate it at a month's warning,
should I be called upon by you to do so at any period
within the next two years. Should I be so far successful
during those twenty-four months as to have satisfied both
yourself and myself, I may then perhaps venture to regard
the preferment as my own in