The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2De Quincey, Thomas
General
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays
other characters--as seedsman, harvester, hedger and ditcher, etc. We
have no doubt that he would have taken a job of paving; he would have
contracted for darning old Christopher's silk stockings, or for a mile
of sewerage; or he would have contracted to dispose by night of the
sewage (which the careful reader must not confound with the sewerage,
that being the ship and the sewage the freight). But all this coarse
labour makes a man's hands horny, and, what is worse, the starvation,
or, at least, impoverishment, of his intellect makes his mind horny;
and, what is worst of all in a clergyman, who is stationed as a watchman
on a church-steeple expressly to warn all others against the
all-besetting danger of worldliness, such an incessant preoccupation of
the heart by coarse and petty cares makes the spiritual apprehensiveness
and every organ of spiritual sensibility more horny than the hoofs of a
rhinoceros.
Kindliness of heart, no doubt, remained to the last with Mr. Walker,
_that_ being secured by the universal spirit of brotherly and social
feeling amongst the dalesmen of the lake district. He was even liberal
and generous, if we may rely upon the few instances reported by W. W.
His life of heroic money-getting had not, it seems, made his heart
narrow in that particular direction, though it must not be forgotten
that the calls upon him were rare and trivial. But however _that_ may
have been, the heart of stone had usurped upon the heart of flesh in all
that regarded the spiritualities of his office. He was conscientious, we
dare say, in what related to the _sacramentum militaire_ (as construed
by himself) of his pastoral soldiership. He would, perhaps, have died
for the doctrines of his church, and we do not like him the worse for
having been something of a bigot, being ourselves the most malignant of
Tories (thank Heaven for all its mercies!). But what tenderness or
pathetic breathings of spirituality _could_ that man have, who had no
time beyond a few stray quarters of an hour for thinking of his own
supreme relations to heaven, or to his flock on behalf of heaven? How
could that man cherish or deepen the motions of religious truth within
himself, whose thoughts were habitually turned to the wool market?
Ninety and odd years he lived on earth labouring like a bargeman or a
miner. Assuredly he was not one of the _faineans_. And within a narrow
pastoral circle he left behind him a fragrant memory that will, perhaps,
wear as long as most reputations in literature. Nay, he even acquired by
acclamation a sort of title, viz., the posthumous surname of the
_wonderful_; pointing, however, we fear, much less to anything in
himself than to the unaccountable amount of money which he left behind
him--unaccountable by comparison with any modes of industry which he
practised, all of which were indomitably persevering, but all humble in
their results. Finally, he has had the honour (which, much we fear, men
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