Other great men there were few. There was
a gentleman rejoicing in the name of Bragg, who
kept a pack oi' hounds, but of whom I never
heard anything boastful or pretentious; and
there were generations of clergymen called
Clacks, the echoes of whose outpourings were
not known to resound beyond the aisles of the
church in which they hereditarily ministered.

In the very first house on entering the town
of Moreton Hampstead there was a maniac
woman, whose screams and howls were heard at
a great distance, from a barred window.

Whence she came, or how she fared,
Nobody knew and nobody cared.

There were no commissioners of lunacy, no
asylums then accessible to the poor, no intrusive
inquirers; it was nobody's business. " Every
man's house is his castle. Why should I get
into trouble for what don't consarn me?"

So in the streets there were idiots wandering
about. Their names were familiar——such as
Crazy Fan and Foolish Bett. They served to
amuse the children, who played with them,
laughed at them, tormented them; but the
older passengers looked on as if they enjoyed,
as they sometimes encouraged, the ribaldry of
the younger. Benevolence has now directed its
solicitude even towards these unfortunates.

Moreton had its celebrities. What town has
not? Our school cobbler was a man of mark.
His name was Ptolomy; he wrote it Tollomy;
but we insisted, and he did not deny it, that he
was directly descended from the great
astronomer. We discovered in him an innate dignity
betokening illustrious ancestry, and while he
vigorously beat his leather on his lapstone, he
smiled and said that perhaps we might not be
far from the truth.

There were two rival barbers, brothers. They
neither agreed in politics nor in religion. One
was grave, the other gay. They were leading
men in their separate factions. One had a
singularly emphatic way of laying down the
law. It was, " Dip my head, sir, if it is not
so!" Had he heard of Sterne's grandiloquent
coiffeur? " Dip my wig, sir, in the ocean, not
a hair will turn!" But the whiggery was on
the side of the serious Presbyterian. The other
was a jolly churchman.

It is a remarkable circumstance in the
religious history of our country, that while the
Independents, who in the time of the Commonwealth
were the most liberal and the most
heterodox of our dissenting sects, have become,
in the progress of time, one of the most orthodox
and exclusive, the Presbyterians, who
were Calvinistic, intolerant and even persecuting,
are now the representatives of the most
advanced of the Christian creeds. The religion
of the staple woollen trade of the west——that
professed by the leading merchants and
manufacturers——was Unitarianism or Arianism under
the Presbyterian name. There were three
churches, called meeting-houses——George's,
James's, and the Mint——in Exeter, where the
great Dissenting schism, which repudiated the
doctrines of the Trinity, broke out nearly a
century and a half ago, and almost every town,
in the neighbourhood had its Unitarian chapel,
most of which have endowments, due to the
prosperity of the now decayed, but then most
prosperous, woollen manufacture, under the
central patronage of a company holding royal
charters as the " Incorporated Guild of Tuckers,
Weavers, and Shearmen," who still possess a
hall in Exeter. Moreton Hampstead had two
such meeting-houses, one called the Presbyterian,
the other the Baptist. A vacancy had
taken place in the first, and a young man,
J. H. B., was elected to fill the post. He
determined at the same time to open a school,
and I was not displeased when my father
told me that I was to return to the old
haunts which were very dear to me—- to the
tors, the moors, and the mountain streams, with
which I had become familiar. The first sermon
of the new minister was like the outburst of a
first love. The text was, " Fulfil ye my joy,"
and it spoke of links never to be broken. Alas!
for human frailty; its name is not always
Woman: for within a few short months, " before
the shoes were old " which had so glibly
mounted the pulpit stairs, " a wider field of
usefulness," to say nothing of a larger salary,
enticed the faithless one away to Dudley, where
he afterwards came to grief, and his history had
better be buried in oblivion. But the good
people of Moreton were very angry——somewhat
bitter in their condemnation. The Baptist
congregation was under the care of a gentle Welsh-
man, named Jacob Isaacs. His father may
have been Isaac Jacobs, for shiftings and
transpositions of Christian names and surnames were
then, and may still be, a Cambrian usage; but
he was not without his renown. He had written
a book called The Apiarian, and was very fond
of a quiet joke, declaring that he was one of the
most ancient of monarchs, being king of the
Hivites, though their associations with the
patriarch Jacob were not of a very creditable
character. On grand occasions a cupboard was
opened for his guests, and the produce of the
hive introduced—- honey, mead, metheglin—- and
he carefully explained the essential differences
between the two drinks, which I believe are
absolutely the same—- the one being the Saxon,
the other the Welsh name. However, he
insisted that the bee furnished the classical
ambrosia and the nectar of the gods, and that
neither gourmand nor gourmet could have
tasted anything superior to either. Yet, strange
to say, though so much of his life and his
thoughts were devoted to his bees, they
exhibited no affection, no partiality, but much ill
will towards him. Instead of a protector and a
friend, they deemed him an intruder and a foe,
and when he approached his hives, he always
covered his hands with gloves and his face with
a veil, and did not hesitate to call his subjects
unjust and ungrateful. Have bees no more
discernment? Have they their preferences and
their prejudices? For I have lately seen a bee-
master open his hives, take out every separate