movement, but have taken refuge in its cracks, as they would have done
forty years ago in those of the Evangelical,--youths who hide their
crass ignorance and dulness under the cloak of Church infallibility,
and having neither wit, manners, learning, humanity, or any other
dignity whereon to stand, talk loud, _pour pis aller_, about the
dignity of the priesthood. Such men Frank had met at neighbouring
clerical meetings, overbearing and out-talking the elder and the wiser
members; and finding that he got no good from them, had withdrawn into
his parish-work, to eat his own heart, like Bellerophon of old. For
Frank was a gentleman and a Christian, if ever one there was. Delicate
in person, all but consumptive; graceful and refined in all his works
and ways; a scholar, elegant rather than deep, yet a scholar still;
full of all love for painting, architecture, and poetry, he had come
down to bury himself in this remote curacy, in the honest desire of
doing good. He had been a curate in a fashionable London Church; but
finding the atmosphere thereof not over wholesome to his soul, he
had had the courage to throw off St. Nepomuc's, its brotherhoods,
sisterhoods, and all its gorgeous and highly-organised appliances for
enabling five thousand rich to take tolerable care of five hundred
poor: and had fled from "the holy virgins" (as certain old ladies,
who do twice their work with half their noise, call them) into the
wilderness of Bethnal Green. But six months' gallant work there, with
gallant men (for there are High Churchmen there who are an honour to
England), brought him to death's door. The doctors commanded some soft
western air. Frank, as chivalrous as a knight-errant of old, would
fain have died at his post, but his mother interfered; and he could
do no less than obey her. So he had taken this remote west country
curacy; all the more willingly because he knew that nine-tenths of the
people were Dissenters. To recover that place to the Church would be
something worth living for. So he had come, and laboured late and