ous _believer_, and under great difficulties
a victorious doer. An example to us all, not of lamed misery, helpless
spiritual bewilderment and sprawling despair, or any kind of _drownage_
in the foul welter of our so-called religious or other controversies and
confusions; but of a swift and valiant vanquisher of all these; a noble
asserter of himself, as worker and speaker, in spite of all these.
Continually, so far as he went, he was a teacher, by act and word, of
hope, clearness, activity, veracity, and human courage and nobleness:
the preacher of a good gospel to all men, not of a bad to any man. The
man, whether in priest's cassock or other costume of men, who is the
enemy or hater of John Sterling, may assure himself that he does not yet
know him,--that miserable differences of mere costume and dialect still
divide him, whatsoever is worthy, catholic and perennial in him, from a
brother soul who, more than most in his day, was his brother and not his
adversary in regard to all that.

Nor shall the irremediable drawback that Sterling was not current in the
Newspapers, that he achieved neither what the world calls greatness nor
what intrinsically is such, altogether discourage me. What his natural
size, and natural and accidental limits were, will gradually appear, if
my sketching be successful. And I have remarked that a true delineation
of the smallest man, and his scene of pilgrimage through life, is
capable of interesting the greatest man; that all men are to an
unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a strange emblem of every
man's; and that Human Portraits, faithfully drawn, are of all pictures
the welcomest on human walls. Monitions and moralities enough may lie
in this small Work, if honestly written and honestly read;--and, in
particular, if any image of John Sterling and his Pilgrimage through
our poor Nineteenth Century be one day wanted by the world, and they can
find some shadow of a true image here, my swift scribbling (which shall
be very swift and immediate) may prove useful by and by.

CHAPTER II. BIRTH AND PARENTAGE.

John Sterling was born at Kaimes Castle, a kind of dilapidated baronial
residence to which a small farm was then attached, rented by his Father,
in the Isle of Bute,--on the 20th July, 1806. Both his parents were
Irish by birth, Scotch by extraction; and became, as he himself did,
essentially English by long residence and habit. Of John himself
Scotland has little or nothing