This, as you truly say, is the age of Atheism--both practical and professional. But it is not only Bradlaugh and Mrs. ---- who distinguish it as such--mult.i.tudes of most worthy and respectable people (in their own estimation) are cla.s.sifiable under this category. Indeed all worldly people whose religion consists in saving appearances, all self-interested folk whose lives are pa.s.sed in struggles with their neighbour for their own advantage--all such as wear down heart and mind and even physical well-being in the feverish ambition to pile up riches, not knowing who shall gather them or purely for the renown of possessing them. All ritualists who think they get to heaven by peculiar haberdashery, and intoning the prayers, which makes a farce of them by depriving them of articulate meaning.
All believers in the vicarious atonement of faith alone, which creed signifies that all _has been done_ instead of all has _to be done_ for them. All who hurry to conventicles on Sunday with gilt-edged prayer-books, and begin on Monday morning to slander, ill-treat, or cheat their neighbours. In short all that excludes the spiritual from _this_ life--which generally indicates unbelief in any other and virtually denies the _necessity_, and therefore the existence, of a Divine Governor. All Professors ---- and ---- in Physical science, all Herbert Spencers, etc. in metaphysical--who arrive by different courses at the same conclusion, viz. that G.o.d is _unknowable_ [_sic_]
and that therefore they need not take the trouble to know Him. All this is but Atheism virtual and avowed.
And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should have come to regard the phenomena of spiritualism as the strongest evidence of those beliefs which were to him more important than life itself, and, this conviction once established, submission to the strange genius of Swedenborg followed almost as a matter of course, for by his "science of correspondencies,"
the new phenomena seemed to fall naturally and inevitably into their proper place in that strange dual scheme of spirit and matter into which Swedenborg had resolved the Universe. When he had once embarked upon Occultism, other curious beliefs followed in the train of these main convictions. He became greatly impressed with the work of a certain Mr.
Melville who believed that he had rediscovered an ancient and long forgotten method of reading the stars which was in fact the original mystery of Freemasonry. Frederick took eagerly to this idea which seemed to fall naturally into place with the Swedenborgian science of correspondencies, and in 1872 he actually came to England with Mr.
Melville in the hope of being able to convince the Freemasons that all modern Masonry with its boasted mysteries was futile and meaningless without the key of Mr. Melville"s discovery in which lay the true explanation of all the masonic signs and symbols. Unfortunately an interview with the Duke of Leinster, the then Grand Master, gave the two apostles little satisfaction. It was on this visit that Frederick saw FitzGerald for the last time, and the latter described him to Mrs. Kemble as being "quite grand and sincere in this as in all else; with the Faith of a gigantic child--pathetic and yet humorous to consider and consort with."
The influence of these ideas gradually coloured Frederick"s view on all current subjects. His years in Florence had been spent in the "hubbub of imminent war," and he writes indignantly of "the rottenness of these pitiable petty States and the incredible fantastic tricks of their abominable rulers." None the less, though he hated and despised most existing monarchies, he was too much imbued with the romance and dignity of the past to look with a very favourable eye on revolution. At first he dismissed Mazzini as "deserving a hempen collar with Nana Sahib and the King of Delhi," an opinion which the experience of later years compelled him to reverse. The story of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to him chaos, but it was the chaos which was to precede the new spiritual dispensation, and political prejudice never hindered him from the true appreciation of progress. Thus he writes in 1869:
It is certain that Evil has never been more rampant than during the last century--witness the great French Revolution, subsequent wars, minor revolutions, and minor wars throughout the globe, the hundreds of millions wasted on warlike machinery, the countless numbers of young men sacrificed to the fiends of ambition and racial jealousy, society honeycombed with frauds, conspiracies, and cla.s.s animosities, etc. etc. On the other hand, never has knowledge of all kinds been more progressive, never have the Arts and Sciences and Literature been so rapidly multiplied and so various. Never were charitable inst.i.tutions more widely extended or practically beneficent. Never, in short, were the researches into all kinds of truths, especially those which concern the relations of man to G.o.d and his neighbour, more earnest, and if this seems to contradict the notorious fact that we are living at present in a world of Atheism and Materialism--which is the same thing--it does not really do so, for the two movements, though separate, are parallel and simultaneous. In short, "The Time of the End" is a transitional state--which will eventually issue in the triumph of Good over Evil once and for ever.
France he always hated as the leader of materialism, and he would repeat with a snort of disgust the remark of M. Bert, who, during the debate in the Chamber on the secularization of Education, observed that it was superfluous to exclude what did not exist. The debacle of 1870 seemed a just if tragic retribution.
"One cannot help, however," he wrote on October 19, 1870, "feeling for beautiful Paris as one would for a Marie Antoinette pa.s.sing on her way to execution. There she is in her solitude and in her beauty. Around her a circle of iron and fire--within her a restless seething of tumultuous pa.s.sions embittering the present--her future a prospect of burning and famine. Such a downfall is unparalleled in history, and the agonies of her expiration--if things are carried to their bitter end--promise to equal those of the terrible siege of Jerusalem."
As might be expected, he tended to Conservatism in politics; Home Rule was anathema, and Disraeli, endeared to him as the possible leader of a United Israel, he regarded as a sincerer statesman than Gladstone. None the less he was able to applaud Gladstone"s action on the occasion of the Bulgarian atrocities, though "even he" seemed to have yielded so much
... to the delicacies and squeamish sensibility, and fluttering nerves of a lolling generation--an age of sofas and carpets--the rousing of which even in the justest of causes, the vindication of the rights of unoffending humanity outraged by savages in comparison with whom n.i.g.g.e.rs and Red Indians are angels, is not to be attempted without careful thought--and though a great cry has gone through the land I fear there will be little wool. There is, however, one consolation--neither Turkey, nor Egypt, nor any ruffian with a bundle of dirty clothes upon his head instead of a hat, will ever get another farthing of _our_ money.
None the less he hated a bigoted Toryism, and thought that "a proper democratic spirit which aims at a reconstruction of society on the principle of "each for all and all for each," the correlation of privileges and duties, worth and honour, wealth and charity (in its best sense), the subst.i.tution of altruism for egoism, ought to find its echo in every loyal heart--and would in fact be the very "end of Sin, and bringing in of the Everlasting Righteousness" foretold."
In literature, too, his mind--in spite of an occasional failure to recognize individual genius--was remarkably alive to the progressive movements of the day. Indeed, for a man so steeped in cla.s.sicism, his freedom from prejudice was remarkable. Browning"s poetry, however, in spite of his affection for the author, he could never appreciate. He wrote to Mrs. Brotherton:
"What you say of Browning"s _Ring and the Book_," he says, soon after the publication of that work, "I have no doubt is strictly applicable, however slashing.... I confess, however, that I have never had the courage to read the book. He is a great friend of mine.... But it does not follow that I should put up with obsolete horrors, and unrhythmical composition. What has come upon the world that it should take any metrical (?) arrangement of facts for holy Poesy? It has been my weakness to believe that the Fine Arts and Imaginative Literature should do something more than astonish us by _tours de force_, black and white contrasts, outrageous inhumanities, or anything criminally sensational, or merely intellectually potent. As you say a good heart is better than a clever head, so I say better a page of feeling than a volume of spasms. Spasms, I fear, is the order of the day. The late Lord Robertson, a legal celebrity at Edinburgh, pleading on behalf of some one, said, with his serious face, which was more tickling than the happiest efforts of Pantaloon: "We are bound to respect his feelings as a man and a butcher." Here the man and the butcher are bound up in one. Now, in Browning"s case, I separate the man from the butcher. I have nothing to say to him in his blue ap.r.o.n and steel by his side, but if I meet him in plain clothes I honour him as a gentleman." And in 1885 he writes: "The Public, it would seem, is beginning to rouse itself to a perception of the unreliability of the Browningian school--I have seen several articles on that subject. How is it that it has never struck his partisans that the probability of one man being so infinitely superior to his contemporaries as to be totally unintelligible to them--is infinitely small?
"One thing appears to me certain in Browning, that all his performances are pure _brain-work_--whatever that may be worth--but as for the "divine heat of temperament," where is it? I can find nothing but the inextricably hard and the extravagantly fantastical. On such diet I cannot live."
Nevertheless, it was always the future of Art, not its past, which stirred his interest, and a letter of his written in 1885, when he was seventy-eight, shows a youth and vitality of mind truly remarkable in one whose life had been so cloistered.
"There can never," he says, "be a second Shakespeare, that is to say, given a man of equal Genius he cannot in this complex and a.n.a.lytical age of Literature embody himself in the metrical and dramatic form if his purpose is to "hold up the mirror to Nature, and to give the Time its form and pressure." The form of prose fiction is a vastly greater one, indeed it may be termed all-comprehensive, and admits of the introduction of lyric or epic verse, in all varieties, as well as the profoundest a.n.a.lysis of character and motive, and is susceptible of the highest range of eloquence and unrhythmical poetry, and whatever it may lose in metrical melody (which, however, is not greatly regarded in dramatic dialogue) it gains immeasurably in its other elements. All things considered, I am of opinion that if a man were endowed with such faculties as Shakespeare"s, they would be more freely and effectively exercised in prose fiction with its wider capabilities than when "cribbed, cabined, and confined" in the trammels of verse."
It may be that the very remoteness of his life was in part the cause of this lasting freshness and freedom of his mind. He lived so far from the world as to be almost entirely removed from any bias of self-interest--the most fruitful source of prejudice. Ambition played no part in his life.
"Once," he wrote in 1888, "I used to have some ambition--that is when I was a boy at school--I verily believe that at that early age I exhausted the demoniacal pa.s.sion which chains you to fixed purposes like a Prometheus and preys upon you like a Vulture. Though many great works have been accomplished under the spur of this (so-called) n.o.ble pa.s.sion, think how much chaotic rubbish has been projected into s.p.a.ce and Time which ought to have been imprisoned to Eternity--how many heart-burnings, jealousies, and disappointments--how often the love of the Beautiful and True is entirely subordinated to that of mere distinction to be won at any cost. How seldom do we hear writers of the same school speak well of one another. Especially poisonous are poets, I think, wherever they apprehend a rival--Honey-suckers like the Bee, they know how to use their stings even while sipping the flowers. The unambitious man is at any rate free to use his eyes, to walk up to and contemplate in the pure clear air and solitude of his mountain-top the face and form of Nature, and like Turner a-fishing, see wonderful effects never to be come at by the hosts of those who get on (or off) by copying one another. I daresay you will disapprove all this and attribute it to indolent epicurism.
"Latterly since the supernatural and the Future Life, and its conditions "such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive," have occupied and absorbed my whole soul to the exclusion of almost every subject which the Gorillas of this world most delight in, whether scientific, political, or literary--I have been led to see what men in general consider a proper use of their stewardship, _i.e._ ruin of body and soul by inordinate superhuman struggles for supremacy--Samson-like heavings to upset the neighbour, or supplant him--carbonic acid-breathing creepings along the dark floors of stifling caverns such as may enable them to sc.r.a.pe together a preponderance of a certain mineral, etc.
etc.--as the most lamentable examples of Phrenitis--arising simply from the ineradicable instinct--of Immortality it is true, but misplaced Immortality--Immortality in this life."
The death of his wife in 1880 was a severe blow to him.
"In answer to your kind letters of sympathy," he wrote to Mr. and Mrs.
Brotherton, "I can say but little. Sorrow such as mine when it falls upon the aged is virtual paralysis, mental and bodily. I know not what I may do for the brief period remaining to me in this world. At present my daughter-in-law attends to household matters, and I still have the presence of children and grandchildren to remind me that I am not left entirely desolate. But my chief consolation is that the beloved of my youth and the friend of my age is already risen, and has cast off the burthen of her mortal cares and pains, and my only hope that, G.o.d willing, I may follow quickly."
A great but less tremendous shock to him was the death in 1887 of his sister Emily, once the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. On this occasion he sent the following lines to his friend:
Farewell, dear sister, thou and I Will meet no more beneath the sky: But in the high world where thou art Mind speaks to Mind, and Heart to Heart, Not in faint wavering tones, but heard As twin sweet notes that sound accord.
Thy dwelling in the Angel sphere Looks forth on a sublimer whole, Where all that thou dost see and hear Is in true concord with thy soul-- A great harp of unnumbered strings Answering to one voice that sings: Where thousand blisses spring and fade Swiftly, as in diviner dream, And inward motions are portrayed In outward shows that move with them: After the midnight and dark river No more to be o"erpast for ever.
Behold the lover of thy youth, That spirit strong as Love and Truth, Many a long year gone before, Awaits thee on the sunny sh.o.r.e: In that high world of endless wonder Nor s.p.a.ce, nor Time can hold asunder Twin souls--as s.p.a.ce and Time have done-- Whom kindest instincts...o...b..in One.
It was inevitable that the later years of one so aged and so solitary should be more and more filled with the chronicle and antic.i.p.ation of death. But he never sank into lethargy, as the following letter, written in his eighty-first year, shows:
My own sorrow is indeed continually revived by memories continually reawakened, not only by the comparatively recent occurrence of my own temporarily final separation from my best friend--but also by that bird"s-eye--so to speak--retrospect, which carries the imagination over lovely landscapes of the days of youth--out of the golden morning light of which emerge, in that unaccountable manner which is quite involuntary, even the most trivial circ.u.mstances--moments of no moment--yet somehow clothed in a more glittering light than the vast tracts drowned in the general splendour of the dawn, some tiny pinnacle that reflects the sun, some far off rillet that gushes out from the wayside.
Even when in his eighty-fourth year his sight began to fail him and the loss drove him still more back into his inner life, the old eagerness of mind remained, though finding a melancholy occupation in noting the changes to which age was daily subjecting his mental and physical const.i.tution. The note of hope is, however, ineradicable:
An old man of my great age is already dead--old age being the only Death--and the faculties which I once possessed receive no impulse, as of old, for activity--no joyous inspiration. The intellect is cold and frozen like the mountain streams in Winter, a moonless midnight; and were it not for the increasing illumination of the immortal spirit which already beholds the dawn of a greater Day beyond the mountains, I should indeed be desolate, lost! For I am 84 years of age next June--and in looking back through my long life--it often seems to me like a dream--many movements, intellectual and physical, seem to me like impossibilities. When I see my little grandson Charlie skipping and hear him shouting and singing, and the light-limbed and light-hearted girls darting like living lightning down the staircase (which if I were to attempt to imitate I should undoubtedly break my neck), I say to myself, is it possible that I can ever have been like them? Alas! for old age. What can be more mournful than a retrospect of the days of childhood? But a truce to solemn thoughts--the Spring is come again, the leaves are unfolding, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, and surely, next to the human countenance, this is the most lovely emblem, the most beautiful representative material of inner spiritualities and the resurrection, and ought to have been so regarded since the dawn of Christianity; for as sure as Winter blossoms into Summer, the Winter of old age will spring into the Eternal Life. Fear not, hope all things! What a contrast to these consoling aspirations is presented in the touching fragment of the old Greek poet Moschus which no doubt expresses the scepticism of the ancient world--I give a free translation:
Aye, aye the garden mallows, mint and thyme When they have wither"d in the winter clime, After a little s.p.a.ce do reappear, And live again and see another year: But we, the brave, the n.o.ble, and the wise, When once for all pale Death hath closed our eyes, Sink into dread oblivion dark and deep, The everlasting, never-waking sleep.
With the approach of death he seemed to himself to undergo a kind of physical regeneration.
"Apropos to spiritual matters," he writes in 1890, "I have had recently for several consecutive days some very strange experiences.
One morning I awoke and seemed to have lost my natural memory. Objects daily presented to me for years seemed no longer familiar as of old--but as when a man after years of travel returning to his home and the chamber he formerly occupied takes some time and labour of thought to bring back to his recollection the whereabouts of objects once (as it were) instinctively known to him--I had the same difficulty in recovering my relations to my own surroundings. And this for days was supplemented by a strange sense of having been far away and conversant with wonderful things--movements and tumults--which only immeasurable distance deadened to my perception like great music borne away by the wind. Ever and anon there flashed up within me what I can only describe symbolically as Iridescences of feeling as when the prismatic colours of a rainbow succeed one another, or the coloured lights in Pyrotechnics cause objects in midnight darkness to a.s.sume their own hues. But all this, wonderful though it may seem, is not the only change that has come upon me--I am happy to say that simultaneously with these phenomena a revolution in my spiritual economy of far greater moment has, I believe, taken place. I have always prayed for that regeneration, or second birth ("Thou must be born again," said the Lord to Nicodemus), to be shielded from selfhood--and as the divine answer to such prayers continually repeated, I can declare, without any self-delusion, that the answer has actually been a sensible change in the nature of my affections. Never have I felt towards those around me, such tender inclinations, such earnest desire to do them all possible good regardless of self-interest, such a spirit of forgiveness of any wrongs; and my earnest prayerful thankfulness for such inestimable benefits has been invariably acknowledged by that Voice from the Lord Himself by which He has repeatedly ratified to my spiritual ear His promise of blessing and the continuation thereof--and that "Thou hast nothing to fear, for I am with thee night and day, body and soul!" Think of this! But for G.o.d"s sake do not attribute these statements of mine, which are comprehended in a period of many years, to self-delusion or self-righteousness. G.o.d knows, from whom nothing is hid, that I have never approached Him except in the spirit of profound humility and self-condemnation, and the answer has always been, "Thou hast nothing to fear. I am with thee.""
As age settled upon him the violence of many of his views abated. His faith in Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism lost their hold on him and gave way to a more philosophic condition of mind. His activity, however, continued unabated. In 1890, after a silence of thirty-six years, he published his _Isles of Greece_, and the success of the volume encouraged him to give to the world two others, _Daphne and other Poems_ in 1891, and _Poems of the Day and Year_ (in which were included some of the verses contained in the volume of 1854) in 1898. In 1896 he left Jersey to join his eldest son, Captain Julius Tennyson, in whose house in Kensington he died on February 26, 1898.
It would be difficult to imagine two persons more strongly contrasted in life and character than Frederick and Charles. Charles (who was always Alfred"s favourite brother) had nothing of the powerful, erratic, tempestuous mind of his elder brother. One does not think of him, as FitzGerald did of Frederick, as a being born for the warmth and glow of the South, yet in appearance he was (like Alfred) far more Southern than the eldest brother. So Spanish were his swarthy complexion, brown eyes, and curly, dark hair, that Thackeray, meeting him in middle age, called him a "Velasquez _tout crache_." Like Alfred, too, he had a magnificent deep ba.s.s voice; and even in dress the two brothers seem to have maintained their affinity, for Charles used to wear a soft felt hat and flowing black cloak much like those which the Millais portrait has identified with his brother, and these garments, with the addition of white cuffs, which he wore turned back over his coat sleeves, intensified the strangely foreign effect of his appearance. But the kinship of the two brothers extended beyond purely physical resemblance. They remained inseparable companions till Charles was ordained, and there was hardly a taste possessed by either which the other did not share. They read, played, and rambled together; both were extremely fond of dancing (one of Charles"s last Sonnets was "On a County Ball") and were much sought after as partners at the b.a.l.l.s of their countryside. The _Poems by Two Brothers_, which were almost entirely the work of Alfred and Charles, while displaying the differing qualities of each, were a joint production, the fruit of common reading and common enthusiasm. Both the brothers were regarded by their contemporaries at Cambridge as destined to achieve poetical greatness. Both possessed the unwearying patience of the craftsman, the same devotion to science and the same power of close and loving observation. Charles, however, lacked the fire and energy of temperament which made Frederick"s character remarkable and was to a great extent shared by Alfred. With all Alfred"s sensitiveness and shrinking from society, he had little of that sympathetic and pa.s.sionate interest in the hopes and achievements of their age which drove the younger brother ever more and more into public life.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER.]
Nothing quieter and less eventful than Charles Tennyson"s life can well be imagined. He was ordained in 1835 (three years after taking his degree) and immediately obtained a Curacy at Tealby. In the same year he became Vicar of Grasby, a small village in the Lincolnshire wolds between Caistor and Brigg.
In the following year he married Louisa Sellwood, whose sister was to become Alfred"s wife, and from that time until just before his death on April 25, 1879, his life, save for an occasional holiday and too frequent lapses from health, knew little variation. Like all the Tennysons, Charles was of a nervous temperament, and this condition often induced acute suffering. So severe indeed was his struggle with this disorder and the still more perilous condition which resulted from it that at one time, soon after his marriage, he was compelled to leave his parish for some months in search of strength. Throughout these trying interludes the devotion of his wife, a woman of great humour and power of mind and character, was of the utmost service to him. Indeed, his debt to her was great at all times of his life. She would often act almost as a curate to him in the straggling parish, tirelessly visiting and nursing the sick (a duty which they both unflinchingly observed even in the epidemics of small-pox which were then frequent), keeping all his accounts, both personal and parochial, and even sometimes writing his sermons. The devotion of the pair was remarkable, retaining a certain youthful ardour to the end, and when Charles died his wife was carried to the grave within a month.
As early as 1830, Charles had published a small volume of sonnets, which (as is well known) earned the hearty commendation of Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. As in the case of Frederick, however, there followed a prolonged silence, the next volume not making its appearance till 1864; others followed in 1868 and 1873, and all were collected and republished, with a sage, benevolent, and affectionate Introduction by his friend James Spedding, in 1880. The reason for this long silence was a slightly different one from that which was responsible for Frederick"s intermission. In both cases, no doubt, the feeling that it would be impertinent for another person of the name of Tennyson to put his work before the public had some influence. In Charles"s case, however, there were further considerations. The violent shock which his health sustained by that prolonged early illness and his subsequent troubles to some extent numbed his powers. "The edge of thought was blunted by the stress of the hard world," and the same cause probably increased his natural modesty till it became almost morbid. He was perpetually haunted by the fear that his poetry was not original, and the only word of satisfaction which Spedding ever heard him use of any of his sonnets was with regard to one which owed its origin to a period of deep affliction, of which the poet said that he thought it was good because he _knew_ it to be true. Whatever the cause, however, during these thirty-four years Charles Turner published nothing and, indeed, hardly even wrote anything. Spedding, in his Introduction, has collected a few fragments which were gathered from the poet"s notebooks, and show that his mind still occasionally noted a stray simile or description, doubtless intended to be subsequently worked up into a poem. A few of these are in his happiest manner. One may quote the following picture of goldfish in a gla.s.s bowl:
As though King Midas did the surface touch, Constraining the clear water to their change With shooting motions and quick trails of light.
Now a rich girth and then a narrow gleam, And now a shaft and now a sheet of gold.
and the lines on the opening of the tomb of Charlemagne:
They rove the marble where the ancient King, Like one forspent with sacred study sate, Robed like a King, but as a scholar pale.
His mind, too, was always working in the same direction on his rambles about the countryside, and he would sometimes, when walking with Agnes Weld, "the little, ambling, stile-clearing niece," who was often his guest, hit on some phrase which took his fancy and was imparted to his companion, who remembers his description of the slanting light-bars on a cloudy day as "the oars of the golden Galley of the sun," and many another phrase as happy as any of the homely and perfect touches in his published works.
But though these years were barren of actual output, they were of value in many ways, and not the least as a period of incubation, for many a phrase or idea first formed in them was subsequently perfected and published. The intermission, too, left him freer to study and to labour among his parishioners. At the beginning and end of his life, poetry occupied a great deal of his time, for each of his sonnets, in spite of their apparent facility, was the result of much toil. He would work at the same lines morning after morning, and read the results aloud to his wife, or niece, or other companion after dinner, the same poem going through a great succession of forms. A letter to Miss Weld, in answer to some suggestion of a subject connected with the then recent excavations at Mycenae, shows his method of work and something of the manifold interests of his secluded life:
"I never can undertake to work to order," he writes, "though the order comes from the dearest of customers. If I get a good hold of that poor, n.o.ble, nodding head I will put him on board of a respectable sonnet and try to save his memory from drowning.... Mycenae is a very exciting subject, but I have Kelsey Moor Chapel to write on--a commission from Mrs. Townsend ... and a poor dead dog haunts me" (see Sonnet 97--Collected Edition).
During these barren years Charles Turner"s devotion to his parochial work was intense. Grasby was a somewhat barbarous village when he obtained the living. Belief in witchcraft was still rife, and one of the popular charms against its influence was to cut a sheep in half, put the body on a scarlet cloth, and walk between the pieces. Such religion as there was among the poor was of a rather harsh spirit, as may be seen from an anecdote preserved by Miss Weld of an old cottager, who, hearing Mrs.
Turner mention the name of Hobbes, exclaimed to his wife: "Why, loovey, that"s the graate Hobbes that"s in h.e.l.l!" The climate, too, was as harsh as the character of the people, for the village stands high and bleak.
Friends remember Louisa Turner going about her ministrations in clogs, and during one particularly sharp winter she writes: "I am in a castle now of double cotton wool petticoat and thick baize drawers and waistcoat." The Turners soon found it necessary to leave the house at Caistor, three miles off, where Sam Turner, Charles"s uncle, the preceding vicar, had lived, for the distance made any real intimacy with the people impossible.
Charles had inherited a small property from his uncle (the event was the occasion of his change of name), and this made it possible for him to build a new vicarage and to further enrich the village with new schools and a new church. He also took the very practical step of buying the village inn and putting it in charge of a reliable servant, a scheme which, for a time at least, had excellent effects on the temperance of the inhabitants.