more artistic effect, and perhaps scarcely one of our theatric heroines was so much at home with her piano, but the blow at the heart that had quashed all her affections, except for her children and the poor, left her a solitary wreck of what she had been, and she soon died, at the time that her daughters were gushing into women. Two or three opportunities presented themselves, when Nicholas had made up his mind to leave the neighbourhood, but, unfortunately for him, they were all in the manufacturing districts, and though he knew that a removal to any of those places would lead to a better income, a more intelligent audience, and a community more free from the old and little municipal prejudices which he had been made to feel, he long hesitated, but at last was compelled to migrate to a large town, which we shall call Moreton, nearly twenty times more populous than the one he was about to quit. But how could he abandon friends who had so promptly invited him, and who, on the whole, had stuck so tenaciously to his ministry? How was he to quit that lovely cottage, with its charming garden, so well stored by the preceding tenant, the old Catholic priest, with almost every variety of English fruit-tree? Or how could he muster the courage to bid farewell to so many special friends who had fought by his side, not only in the church-rate struggle, but in the more deadly grapple with the old corporation, and the excessively High-Church party, who had been almost suddenly raised by the new vicar, a prospective Puseyite? He accomplished, however, the whole business by removing at once, and bidding no one farewell; and, after two days' journey, he entered the noisy and smoky streets of Moreton, to be one of seven Independent ministers instead of the only one, to find as many churches and Wesleyan chapels, and to commence to him that ever-memorable ministry, the faults and virtues of which he can now more calmly survey. First, however, let Nicholas speak of the impression made on him by the first sight of this manufacturing population, which was certainly in a higher state of mere thinking development, but incomparably more ngly in its features, more crafty in its speech, immeasurably more pert in its bearing to every one, and more unimpressible of feeling. While the men of the Marshes were thinking of a measure, the men of Moreton would have despatched and forgotten it, and with their curt and sharp jokes, and their grotesque and rude caricatures, would raise a laugh from the thousand before the countryman could have understood the force of an observation. So far, then, as the exchange went, Nicholas had won a shrewder community, which most emphatically needed the gospel even more than the field-workers to whom he had been preaching, but all the advantages nearly were confined to that one item of a ruder but a further developed thinking power. And what can be, without a corresponding development of the moral feelings, a more hideous and to-be-dreaded thing than mere mental growth? Hence many of the criminals and some of the forms of crime peculiar to the manufacturing districts, the more desperate struggle between the employers and the servants, the bolder air of reckless independence assumed by the workmen in times of good trade, their harder drink ing, the increased love of finery among the female members of society, and the early self-control which young people acquire, and which generally ends either in extravagance or rakishness. No one except a groom or a household servant ever touches the hat when he meets a superior in Moreton or any other of the manufacturing districts, because Jack thinks himself not only as good, but better than his master; and as to women-servants in that town, they were as inferior in habits of thrifty carefulness and civility as possible to those of the agricultural district, though their wages were double, and their rights,' as they called what were elsewhere denominated 'privileges,' were tenfold more numerous. All this our young preacher rapidly learned in his new situation, from his own experience and observations in the families with which he visited, and he soon confirmed his opinions from what took place in the religious society of which he was the minister. From the rapid increase at first of his congregation, Nicholas believed for a time that these new hearers were really interested in his preaching and his person, and from their quick apprehension of his meaning, and their greater readiness to fall into immediate action, the preacher was flattered and deluded. No long time was required to elapse before he learned the character of these new additions to his flock, which had been made for the most part from the disaffected of other congregations; from the miserly, who heard a minister for years whom they yet refused to support; from men of doubtful characters, who had lost all the confidence of their former churches; from persons of doctrinal peculiarity, who flattered themselves that the new preacher would meet their views; and from that uneasy and ever-discontented section of the young who are mad with the thirst for beauty, or who believe that mere change is an equivalent for improvement. Among these new comers to the congregation of Nicholas were a few wastril characters, who had previously abandoned the chapel, but the new views and the fresh fire of our country preacher did not conquer their cups, or their sluggishness and spiritual fatalism; though along with the rabble came also a few respectable and worthy families, who became, and yet remain, some of the most stedfast friends that Nicholas ever found. The chapel had only been in existence about fifty years, and during that period it had possessed seven ministers, with all of whom the church had quarrelled, and no one of whom had it long or adequately supported. All this, however, Nicholas could only learn in course of time, from a careful examination of the church-books, nor, such was the faith he reposed in present pretensions, did it at all fill him with the fear of failure, or induce him to see the guile and the treachery that he might have beheld in those dark and laughing faces. which joked with God in prayer, and mounted the pulpit occasionally, when Nicholas was ill, without either preparation or decorum. It was not long after Nicholas had accepted this urgent invitation that he might have been seen freely shedding tears in his study at the toolate discovered fact, that he had left a situation in the Marshes, with but one or two defects, for that of Moreton, where these defects became fifty times magnified, and the advantages were comparatively reduced. It was a new feature in the ministerial life of Nicholas to have in the same town six or seven other churches of the same order, and one to the working of which he was for a long time a perfect novice. He entered the borough with the belief that all these ministers would be brethren, ready to suggest his dangers, and willing to rescue him from snares, as he felt assured he was so inclined himself to them. He soon after his entrance to Moreton discovered that these assumed brethren were real rivals, and actuated by the same suspicion and jealousy that he found among competitors in trade, with this difference only, that the competition of the latter class was acknowledged and confessed, but that of the former was only discovered under the shadows of a professional varnish. This jealousy soon displayed itself in an obnoxious form by the older ministers and their partisans, who had kept their pulpits and the platform guarded against new men, and were not willing to allow our young preacher to assume in the public meetings of the town that position to which his official connexion entitled him the struggle, however, was short and decided, and Nicholas won the acknowledgment of his claims by four of the oldest ministers, but their partisans remembered the defeat against a day when, as they thought, it would be their turn to become victors. : The pater presbyterum was above eighty years of age, whose short sermons of twenty minutes long, and his habit of determined controlling every thing and every one, kept his congregation rather in the unity of awe than of love; and as he had baptized nearly the whole of his flock, there was an hereditary tolerance to him which was by no means allowed to the young man who, inconceivably his superior, was his co-pastor. Old Mr. Baldwyn was never at a loss for the means of retaining his power, and when at last he did retire, it was with the sardonic boast to younger men, Bless your lives, I have forgotten more than ever you knew!' He did, however, retire at last, though Nicholas imagines ignorant of the fact, that every one else knew, that the cause of Dissent was incomparably reduced from the state in which this very old man had found it in Moreton fifty years before. Peace be to his name, for he was as good a man as the narrow soul that he possessed, and his proverbial prudence, if not avarice, would permit; he did not long live to enjoy his annuity for so long a period of working in petto; and if hundreds of men in Moreton curse the names of his sons, it may be that old Baldwyn was not much to blame. The second of the senior ministers was the Rev. Thomas Doolittle, A.M., a gentleman of probably eighteen stone weight, of large, awkward build, of fat and very bald head, short-sighted in addition, and possessed of an accomplished lady of fortune for a wife. This gentleman was the minister of the largest and the best chapel in the town, but his own congregation, though the representative of the ejected ministers in 1662, was diminutively small, and that, as we take it, because he was a mere man of books, and, without forming independent opinions of his own, enslaved himself to those of Howe and Bates, Charnock and Clarkson, with men of that old and profound school, whom the public would not now patronize. Hence he had only a small number of persons, who attended because their ancestors had done so before them, those who thought him a good man because he had much wealth, and some few of the lovers of high doctrines, with their dependents, servants, and friends, making an audience altogether of 150 to 200 persons in a building that would hold 1,500 or 1,800 people! This congregation, though small, was the Privy Council to the Dissenters of Moreton, and on account of its wealth, its age, and its respectability, was tolerated in assuming the dictatorship to the other churches, to which Nicholas for a time was obliged to bow. This gentleman, too, was the representative preacher of the town in the judgment of most of the inhabitants; strangers were directed to him if they desired to attend a Dissenting chapel; but so ill-governed a taste, and so badly arranged were the stores of his mind, that few who heard him preach ever left the chapel with feelings of approbation, while it was to be regretted that one would often hear of the younger branches of the old families quitting Mr. Doolittle and Dissent together, and betaking themselves to the less defined and more indifferent system of the Established Church. And yet Nicholas found this gentleman a much more interesting companion than he was a preacher he could tell all the best editions of the Classics, read with ease all the modern criticism of emendatory scholarship, knew somewhat, but less, than Nicholas himself of the early Fathers of the Church, and could quote almost every modern book that had been published; and as he was a generation older than our author, he could tell him stories worth knowing of some of the more distinguished pioneers. But this gentleman, too, had the same fault as his colleague, Mr. Baldwyn-that of an apparently undue love of money; and while this gave to the denominational proceedings an ungenerous aspect, it repelled the young and the benevolent to that degree, that Mr. Doolittle had scarcely any of them in his audience. He died some time ago, and his place was filled by a snappish dialectician, who delivered metaphysical theses on various subjects, and called that preaching the gospel of Christ! The third of the new ministerial colleagues of Nicholas was the Rev. Francis Cocker, who was upwards of seventy years of age at the time that he entered Moreton, and had a congregation of about 250 to 300 persons, almost entirely of the lower classes, to whom he preached on the Sabbath-day with more or less success, and acted as an accountant at a guinea a-day through the week, and was almost always fully employed. Whether this trade was Mr. Cocker's original employment, Nicholas never learned: we will assume, that it was resorted to to help his inadequate salary as a minister, though he had three or four very wealthy persons in his congregation. Of all the dwarfed specimens of ministerial mind that Nicholas ever knew, that of old Franky,' as he was familiarly called, was the most complete. At any thing advanced which he could not find in the Orthodox Magazine' he would at once utter his prompt denunciation; and if he were reproached with not reading he would rejoin, There is nothing new in the gospel, and if my friend Mr. Doolittle meets with anything worth knowing in his extensive reading he will be sure to tell us, for he reads for us all!' Mr. Cocker, however, so overworked his brain during the week, that he was cut off shortly after Nicholas knew him by a rapid and violent series of epileptic fits; and when this merchant-preacher was buried, all the rest of the ministers walked as mourners at his funeral, while one of them rehearsed the gloriously consistent life of the deceased. This worthy man commonly had the credit of shooting the bullets of Messrs. Baldwyn and Doolittle; and as he had a great sway of commercial influence, he might have accomplished the most beneficial changes in Moreton, but he wanted the time, the courage, and, above all, the liberal soul. We now come to the most original of all the ministerial colleagues of Nicholas in the person of Mark Tucker-a wit, a punster, and a general joker in the pulpit, but who kept up his great influence to the day of his leaving Moreton. For years Mr. Tucker had his chapel well filled, not merely with the hunters after a joke, or the thirsters for some new display of novelty, but with good, staid, and intelligent people, who infinitely preferred a sermon of the smart things which Mark would produce, to the long, wordy, windiness of Mr. Doolittle, or even the more poetic effusions of Nicholas himself. They were right for this preference, because, though it neither implied nor led to reading, it abounded in those short and fresh business views of Christianity which, if it neglected the commentary and the Lexicon, it bent Christian verities to the arts, the trades, and the wants of life, and sent home the audience with the belief that it had heard something original and useful. The extent to which this quality of Mark Tucker prevailed may be known by the fact, that every one had a treasury of his remarkable sayings, while no doubt many that were of foreign growth are to this day steadily affiliated on him. Nicholas often attempted to analyze this quality in the preaching of Mr. Tucker, but it always foiled him; for if he called it pictorial, he found that he had left a material part out of the definition; or if he said it was a witty style, while so loose a phrase might mislead the reader, it could neither convey a correct notion of those exquisite flights of imagination in which Mr. Tucker would indulge, or still less that train of boldly-conceived religious thinking which he would at times throw with apparent nonchalance from him among the more receptive of his people. This gift was not the result of polish or study, for it often broke out most brilliantly on the spur of the occasion, and was noticed to be less common and fecund towards the close of life. But the highest testimonies in sudden and strange conversions, such as those we read of in the Acts of the Apostles, were frequently heard among religious people to the powers of our rude Mark Tucker, whose life was inconceivably more worth writing for the power it might contain to set modern preachers once more on their feet again, than the vagaries of |