s, should be
a squire in canonical dress. The clergy of the eighteenth century
probably varied between the extremes represented by Trulliber and the
Vicar of Wakefield. Many of them were excellent people, with a mild
taste for literature, contributing to the _Gentleman's Magazine_,
investigating the antiquities of their county, occasionally confuting a
deist, exerting a sound judgment in cultivating their glebes or
improving the breed of cattle, and respected both by squire and farmers.
The 'Squarson,' in Sydney Smith's facetious phrase, was the ideal
clergyman. The purely sacerdotal qualities, good or bad, were at a
minimum. Crabbe, himself a type of the class, has left admirable
portraits of his fellows. Profound veneration for his noble patrons and
hearty dislike for intrusive dissenters were combined in his own case
with a pure domestic life, a keen insight into the uglier realities of
country life and a good sound working morality. Miss Austen, who said
that she could have been Crabbe's wife, has given more delicate pictures
of the clergyman as he appeared at the tea-tables of the time. He varies
according to her from the squire's excellent younger brother, who is
simply a squire in a white neck-cloth, to the silly but still
respectable sycophant, who firmly believes his lady patroness to be a
kind of local deity. Many of the real memoirs of the day give pleasant
examples of the quiet and amiable lives of the less ambitious clergy.
There is the charming Gilbert White (1720-1793) placidly studying the
ways of tortoises, and unconsciously composing a book which breathes an
undying charm from its atmosphere of peaceful repose; William Gilpin
(1724-1804) founding and endowing parish schools, teaching the
catechism, and describing his vacation tours in narratives which helped
to spread a love of natural scenery; and Thomas Gisborne (1758-1846),
squire and clergyman, a famous preacher among the evangelicals and a
poet after the fashion of Cowper, who loved his native Needwood Forest
as White loved Selborne and Gilpin loved the woods of Boldre; and Cowper
himself (1731-1800) who, though not a clergyman, lived in a clerical
atmosphere, and whose gentle and playful enjoyment of quiet country life
relieves the painfully deep pathos of his disordered imagination; and
the excellent W. L. Bowles (1762-1850), whose sonnets first woke
Coleridge's imagination, who spent eighty-eight years in an amiable and
blameless life, and was c