But if it be a melancholy spectacle to see the wreck of a man of great intellect and noble nature, whom banishment in his prime and poverty in his old age have blighted; scarcely less saddening is the sight of the active and energetic young man of merely ordinary abilities to whom a country living has come in his youth and vigour, and once for all has stunted his growth and extinguished his ambition. There is no man more out of place, and who takes longer to fit into his place, than the worthy young clergyman who has been ordained to a town curacy, kept for four or five years at all the routine work of a large town parish, worked and admirably organized as--thank God!--most large town parishes are, and who, at eight or nine and twenty, is dropped down suddenly into a small village, and told that there he is to live and die. He does not know a horse from a cow. He has had his regular work mapped out for him by his superior officer as clearly as if he were a policeman. He has been part of a very complex machinery, religious, educational, eleemosynary. Every hour has been fully occupied, so occupied that he has lost all the habits of reading and study which he ever possessed. He has to preach at least one hundred sermons in the course of the year, and there is not a single one in his very small repertory that is in the least suitable for the new congregation; and for the first time in his life he finds himself called upon to stand alone with no one to consult, no one to lean on, no one to help him, and in so much a worse condition than the aforesaid Robinson Crusoe that the indigenous sons of the soil come and stare at him with an eye to their chances of getting a meal out of him, or making a meal off him, in the meantime doing, as the wicked always have done since the Psalmist’s days, making mouths at him and ceasing not!