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
your window, and the green hill you see through it, with white
sheep. And even when you have got your mind under control, and the
lines flow more willingly from your pen, you cannot but look out
occasionally into the sunshiny, shady corner in your view, and think
you should be there. And when the prescribed pages are at length
completed, how delightful to lock them up, and be off into the air
again! You are far happier now than you were in the morning. The
shadow of your work was upon you then: now you may with a pleased
conscience, and under no sense of pressure, saunter about, and
enjoy your little domain. Many things have been accomplished since
you went indoors. The weeds are gone from the corner: the spray
of the rose lias been trained. The potato-beds have been examined:
the potatoes will be all ready in two days more. Sit down in the
shade, warm yet cool, of a great tree. Now is the time to read the
Saturday Review, especially the article that pitches into you. What
do you care for it? I don't mean that you despise it: I mean that
it causes you no feeling but one of amusement and pleasure. You
feel that it is written by a clever man and a gentleman: you know
that there is not a vestige of malice in it. You would like to shake
hands with the writer, and to thank him for various useful hints.
As for reviewing which is truly malignant--that which deals in
intentional misrepresentation and coarse abuse--it is practically
unknown in respectable periodicals. And wherever you may find it
(as you sometimes may) you ought never to be angry with the man
who did it: you ought to be sorry for him. Depend upon it, the poor
fellow is in bad health or in low spirits: no one but a man who is
really unhappy himself will deliberately set himself to annoy any
one else. It is the misery, anxiety, poverty, which are wringing the
man's heart, that make their pitiful moan in that bitter article.
Make the poor man better off, and he will be better natured.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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