particularization, both words and music lying far beyond the reach of the
most ambitious amateur in the congregation: an anthem in which the
key-bugles always ran away at a great pace, while the bassoon every now
and then boomed a flying shot after them.

As for the clergyman, Mr. Gilfil, an excellent old gentleman, who smoked
very long pipes and preached very short sermons, I must not speak of him,
or I might be tempted to tell the story of his life, which had its little
romance, as most lives have between the ages of teetotum and tobacco. And
at present I am concerned with quite another sort of clergyman--the Rev.
Amos Barton, who did not come to Shepperton until long after Mr. Gilfil
had departed this life--until after an interval in which Evangelicalism
and the Catholic Question had begun to agitate the rustic mind with
controversial debates. A Popish blacksmith had produced a strong
Protestant reaction by declaring that, as soon as the Emancipation Bill
was passed, he should do a great stroke of business in gridirons; and the
disinclination of the Shepperton parishioners generally to dim the unique
glory of St Lawrence, rendered the Church and Constitution an affair of
their business and bosoms. A zealous Evangelical preacher had made the
old sounding-board vibrate with quite a different sort of elocution from
Mr. Gilfil's; the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New
Versions; and the great square pews were crowded with new faces from
distant corners of the parish--perhaps from Dissenting chapels.

You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of
Shepperton. He was no such thing. Those were days when a man could hold
three small livings, starve a curate a-piece on two of them, and live
badly himself on the third. It was so with the Vicar of Shepperton; a
vicar given to bricks and mortar, and thereby running into debt far away
in a northern county--who executed his vicarial functions towards