The Recreations of a Country ParsonBoyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
General
The Recreations of a Country Parson
Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
Clergy -- Anecdotes; Country life -- England; Rural clergy -- England
And yet the upshot of the conversation was, that though given in
a highly disagreeable and obtrusively base form, there was much
truth in what Ellesmere had said. It is to be remembered that he
did not pretend to describe a good man, but only a successful one.
And it is to be remembered likewise that prudence verges toward
baseness: and that the difference between the suggestions of each
lies very much in the fashion in which these suggestions are put
and enforced. As to the use of the trumpet, how many advertising
tailors and pill-makers could testify to the soundness of Ellesmere's
principle? And beyond the Atlantic it finds special favor. When
Barnum exhibited his mermaid, and stuck up outside his show-room
a picture of three beautiful mermaids, of human size, with flowing
hair, basking upon a summer sea, while inside the show-room he had
the hideous little contorted figure made of a monkey with a fish's
tail attached to it, probably the proportion of the trumpet to the
thing trumpeted was even greater than seventy-three to twenty-seven.
Dunsford suggests, for the comfort of those who will not stoop to
unworthy means for obtaining success, the beautiful saying, that
"Heaven is probably a place for those who have failed on earth."
And Ellesmere, adhering to his expressed views, declares--
If you had attended to them earlier in life, Dunsford would now be
Mr. Dean; Milverton would be the Right Honorable Leonard Milverton,
and the leader of a party; Mr. Midhurst would be chief cook
to the Emperor Napoleon; the bull-dog would have been promoted to
the parlor; I, but no man is wise for himself, should have been
Lord Chancellor; Walter would be at the head of his class without
having any more knowledge than he has at present; and as for you
two girls, one. would be a Maid of Honor to the Queen, and the
other would have married the richest man in the county.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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