All the world knows, or if it doth not know it has profited but little by the industry of antiquarians, that Stow, in the division of Lindsey, and eight miles north-and-by-west of Lincoln, was an ancient Roman station, under the euphonic appellation of _Sidnacester_; that under that name it was the seat of a Saxon bishopric; that although Remigius de Feschamp, one of the Norman tyrant's fighting churchmen, transferred the seat of the diocese to Lincoln, yet when the stately cathedral which he founded was finished, while they placed his episcopal effigy on one of the grand pinnacles of the imposing west front, they fixed the grotesque image of "the Swineherd of Stow" (holding in his hand the horn which he gave filled with silver pennies, towards building the Minster,) on the other; that the episcopal palace of Stow was the favourite residence of the bishops of Lincoln down to the close of the fourteenth century, and that Stow still gives title to an archdeacon; lastly, that its venerable-looking church, dedicated to the blessed Virgin, constructed in the form of the Holy Rood, and adorned with a west door of decayed Gothic grandeur, is, to this day, called "the Mother of Lincoln Minster." Now such being the distinctions of Stow itself, of course the "Perpetual Curate" of Stow, on receiving the awful impressment of episcopal hands, and the mysterious investiture of canonical habits, together with the comfortable appointment of the patron to the vacant curacy, entered on the discharge of his spiritual functions with strong notions of the altitude of his office, and of the plenary powers attached thereto. The ideas of the governed, however, in these days, somehow or other, don't happen to preserve an equal altitude, respecting office, with those of the governors; and the new Perpetual Curate of Stow, the successor to the once vice-regal priests of Sidnacester, was stricken with ghostly astonishment at finding that sundry rustics of his parish cared not a bodle for his new authority; that they snapped their fingers at his counsel and reproofs; and, setting at nought his college learning, preferred lending their ears to the unlearned Wesleyan local preachers,--a race of heretics who are so vulgar and unfashionable as to follow the example of Paul, and other vulgar workers of old, who earned their bread with the labour of their own hands, and yet, occasionally, ministered in word and doctrine. In the very nature of things this was unsavoury to a clergyman,--especially to a young one,--but more especially to one who actually stood in the shoes, speaking spiritually, of the princely and potential bishops of Sidnacester: it was not for him, above all established teachers in the shire, to endure such contemptuous preferences, and by that endurance permit heresy to bud and blossom unchecked.