with romances, and this circumstance made me read the Pilgrim's
Progress with eagerness, though to no purpose." The new era, of
which he was to be the aggressive spiritual representative from
Christendom, had not dawned. Walter Scott was ten years his junior.
Captain Cook had not discovered the Sandwich Islands, and was only
returning from the second of his three voyages while Carey was still
at school. The church services and the watchfulness of his father
supplied the directly moral training which his grandmother had
begun.

The Paulerspury living of St. James is a valuable rectory in the
gift of New College, Oxford. Originally built in Early English, and
rebuilt in 1844, the church must have presented a still more
venerable appearance a century ago than it does now, with its noble
tower in the Perpendicular, and chancel in the Decorated style,
dominating all the county. Then, as still, effigies of a Paveli and
his wife, and of Sir Arthur Throckmorton and his wife recumbent head
to head, covered a large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the
Bathurst and other monuments called forth first the fear and then
the pride of the parish clerk's eldest son. In those days the clerk
had just below the pulpit the desk from which his sonorous "Amen"
sounded forth, while his family occupied a low gallery rising from
the same level up behind the pulpit. There the boys of the free
school also could be under the master's eye, and with instruments of
music like those of King David, but now banished from even village
churches, would accompany him in the doggerel strains of Sternhold
and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper. To the far right the boys
could see and long for the ropes under the tower, in which the
bell-ringers of his day, as of Bunyan's not long before, delighted.
The preaching of the time did nothing more for young Carey than for