"The Puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have
abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of
our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate
Calvinism. Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among
the posterity of A.L.

"Our hero was the only son of Habakkuk Liston, settled as an anabaptist
minister upon the patrimonial soil of his ancestors. A regular
certificate appears, thus entered in the Church-Book at Lupton
Magna:--'_Johannes, filius Habakkuk et Rebecccæ Liston, Dissentientium,
natus quinto Decembri_, 1780, _baptizatus sexto Februarii sequentis;
Sponsoribus J. et W. Woollaston, unâ cum Maria Merryweather_.' The
singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming to the child-rites of
the Church would have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this
entry, had I not been obliged with the actual sight of it, by the favor
of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy parish-clerk of Lupton.
Possibly some expectation in point of worldly advantages from some of
the sponsors might have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have
appeared, from the practice and principles of that generally rigid sect.
The term _Dissentientium_ was possibly intended by the orthodox
clergyman as a slur upon the supposed inconsistency. What, or of what
nature, the expectations we have hinted at may have been, we have now no
means of ascertaining. Of the Woollastons no trace is now discoverable
in the village. The name of Merryweather occurs over the front of a
grocer's shop at the western extremity of Lupton.

"Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year,
in which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the
rising generation of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the