However, my friend continued unvexed for a good deal more than fifty years, enjoying that peace, external as well as internal, which, by so eminent a title, belonged to a spirit so evangelically meek and dovelike. I mention him chiefly for the sake of describing his interesting house and household, so different from all which belong to this troubled age, and his impressive style of living. The house seemed almost monastic; and yet it stood in the centre of one of the largest, busiest, noisiest towns in England; and the whole household seemed to have stepped out of their places in some Vandyke, or even some Titian, picture, from a forgotten century and another climate. On knocking at the door, which of itself seemed an outrage to the spirit of quietness which brooded over the place, you were received by an ancient manservant in the sober livery which belonged traditionally to Mr. ----'s[22] family; for he was of a gentleman's descent, and had had the most finished education of a gentleman. This venerable old butler put me in mind always, by his noiseless steps, of the Castle of Indolence, where the porter or usher walked about in shoes that were shod with felt, lest any rude echoes might be roused. An ancient housekeeper was equally venerable, equally gentle in her deportment, quiet in her movements, and inaudible in her tread. One or other of these upper domestics,--for the others rarely crossed my path,--ushered me always into some room expressing by its furniture, its pictures, and its coloured windows, the solemn tranquillity which, for half a century, had reigned in that mansion. Among the pictures were more than one of St. John, the beloved apostle, by Italian masters. Neither the features nor the expression were very wide of Mr. Clowes's own countenance; and, had it been possible to forget the gross character of Swedenborg's reveries, or to substitute for these fleshly dreams the awful visions of the Apocalypse, one might have imagined easily that the pure, saintly, and childlike evangelist had been once again recalled to this earth, and that this most quiet of mansions was some cell in the island of Patmos. Whence came the stained glass of the windows I know not, and whether it were stained or painted. The revolutions of that art are known from Horace Walpole's account; and, nine years after this period, I found that, in Birmingham, where the art of staining glass was chiefly practised, no trifling sum was charged even for a vulgar lacing of no great breadth round a few drawing-room windows, which one of my friends thought fit to introduce as an embellishment. These windows, however, of my clerical friend were really "_storied_ windows," having Scriptural histories represented upon them. A crowning ornament to the library or principal room was a sweet-toned organ, ancient, and elaborately carved in its wood-work, at which my venerable friend readily sate down, and performed the music