It is remarkable, therefore, that such a man should have been guilty of one such error. “It was not a crime,” he said cleverly, in speaking of the matter to me, “it was worse; it was a blunder.” And that is what we all felt. The matter can be explained, however, by a reference to the peculiar conditions of the moment in which it appeared. The Deanery of Bury had just fallen vacant by death of Henry Carver, the elder.[73] A Liberal Unionist Government was in power, and Lambkin perhaps imagined that controversy still led--as it had done but a few years before--to the public notice which it merits. He erred, but it was a noble error. One thing at least we can rejoice in, the letter may have hurt Lambkin in this poor mortal life; but it was of incalculable advantage to the generation immediately succeeding his own. I cannot but believe that from that little source springs all the mighty river of reform which has left so profound a mark upon the hosiery of this our day. The letter is as follows:-- AN OPEN LETTER BURFORD. _St. John’s Eve, 1876._ MY DEAR BURFLE, You have asked my advice on a matter of deep import, a matter upon which every self-respecting Englishman is asking himself the question “Am I a _sheep_ or a _goat_?” My dear Burfle, I will answer you straight out, and I know you will not be angry with me if I answer also in the agora, “before the people,” as Paul would have done. Are you a _sheep_ or a _goat_? Let us think. You say rightly that the question upon which all this turns is the question of boots. It is but a symbol, but it is a symbol upon which all England is divided. On the one hand we have men strenuous, determined, eager--men (if I may say so) of true Apostolic quality, to whom the buttoned boot is sacred to a degree some of us may find it difficult to understand. They are few, are these devout pioneers, but they are in certain ways, and from some points of view, among the _élite_ of the Nation, so to speak. On the other hand we have the great mass of sensible men, earnest, devout, practical--what Beeker calls in a fine phrase “Thys corpse and verie bodie of England[74]”--determined to maintain what their fathers had before them, and insisting on the laced boot as the proper foot-gear of the Church.