e which he had at heart.

If it were the object of these sketches to make people laugh, Grimshaw's
life would furnish us with a fruitful subject of amusement. How he
dressed himself up as an old woman in order to discover who were the
disturbers of his cottage lectures; how he sold his Alderney cow because
'she would follow him up into the pulpit;' how a visitor at Haworth
looked out of his bedroom window one morning and saw to his horror the
vicar cleaning his guest's boots; how he is said (though this anecdote
is rather apocryphal) once to have made his congregation sing all the
176 verses of the 119th Psalm, while he went out to beat up the
wanderers to attend public worship; how he once interrupted a preacher
who was congratulating the Haworth people on the advantages they enjoyed
under a Gospel ministry, by crying out in a loud voice, 'No, no, sir,
don't flatter them; they are most of them going to Hell with their eyes
open;' these and many other such stories might be told at full
length.[802] But it is more profitable to dwell upon the noble,
disinterested work which he did, quite unrecognised by the great men of
his day, in a district which had sore need of such apostolical labours.
His last words were, 'Here goes an unprofitable servant'--words which
are no doubt true in the mouths of the best of men; but if any man might
have boasted that he had done profitable service in his Master's cause,
that man would have been William Grimshaw.

There is a strong family likeness between Grimshaw and _Berridge of
Everton_ (1716-1793), but the marked features of the character were more
conspicuous in the latter than in the former. Both were energetic
country parsons, and both itinerated; but Berridge went over a wider
field than Grimshaw. Both were oddities; but the oddities of Berridge
were more outrageous than those of Grimshaw. Both were stirring
preachers; but the effects of Berridge's preaching were more startling
if not more satisfactory than those which attended Grimshaw. Both were
Calvinists; but Berridge's Calvinism was of the more marked type of the
two. Moreover, Berridge rushed into the very thick of the Calvinistic
controversy, from which Grimshaw held aloof. Berridge was the better
read and the more highly trained man of the two. He was a Fellow of
Clare Hall, Cambridge, and before his conversion he was much sought
after, and that by men of great eminence, as a wit and an amusing boon
companion. The parish ch