CHAPTER XIX.

The Church, in the days we are speaking of, was in a very torpid and sleepy state, not only in Liverpool, but throughout the land. None of the evangelical clergy had then appeared in this district, to stimulate the pace of the old-fashioned jog-trot High Churchmen. Neither had Laudism revived, under its new name of Puseyism. Nothing was heard from our pulpits but what might have passed muster at Athens, or been preached without offence in the great Mosque of Constantinople. In fact, “Extract of Blair” was the dose administered, Sunday after Sunday, by drowsy teachers to drowsy congregations. If it did no harm, it did no good. We do not here speak of James Blair, Commissary of Virginia, President of William and Mary College, etc., whose works, little known, contain a mine of theological wealth. We allude to Dr. Hugh Blair, whose sermons, so celebrated in his day and long after, are really, when analysed, nothing better than a string of cold moral precepts, mixed up with a few gaudy flowers culled from the garden of rhetoric. We have often wondered at the praise beyond measure which Dr. Johnson again and again bestowed upon Blair’s diluted slip-slop and namby-pamby trifles. He not only spoke of them in the highest terms on every occasion, but thus, in his strange way, once exclaimed, “I love Blair’s sermons. Though the dog is a Scotchman, and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not be, I was the first to praise them. Such was my candour.” At all events, as we have already stated, “Extract of Blair” was the pulpit panacea universally prescribed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And we are bound to add, as far as our youthful recollections go, that the majority of the Liverpool clergy in those days were rather below than above the average of mediocrity.

There were some among them, however, whose names are worth recalling. One of the best preachers in those old times was the incumbent of St. Stephen’s, Byrom-street, the Rev. G. H. Piercy, a fine fellow in every way. He is still alive at his living of Chaddesley, in Worcestershire, to which he was presented through the influence of old Queen Charlotte. His mother-in-law, the wife of the Rev. Mr. Sharp, then vicar of Childwall, had been about the court in some capacity or other, and it was the good fashion of her Majesty never to forget her friends. Mr. Piercy must have reached the age of the patriarchs at least. Then there was the Rev. Mr. Milner, of St. Catharine’s Church, Temple-street, which was removed in making some improvements in that part of the town. Poor Mr. Milner! When not washing his hands, he employed each hour of the day in running after the hour before, and was always losing ground in the race. A kind-hearted man he was, and a pleasant one when you could catch him. He was known as “the late Mr. Milner.” The Rev. Mr. Vause preached in those days at Christ Church. He was considered to be a brilliant star in the pulpit, and was indeed a first-rate scholar, a fellow-student with the illustrious Canning, who made many and strong efforts to reclaim him from a course of life which unhappily contradicted and marred all his Sunday teachings. But, even with regard to his sermons, effective and telling as they were made by style, voice and manner, it was found, after his death, when they passed into other hands, that they were chiefly Blair, with others copied from the popular writers of the day. A clergyman, who was to preach before the Archbishop of York, had the choice of them for the occasion. He picked out the one which seemed to him to be the most spicy and telling, and, confident at the time that it was the production of Vause himself, delivered it with mighty emphasis and stunning effect. When it was over, the Archbishop blandly smiled, praised it exceedingly, and then, to the horror and astonishment of the preacher, whispered, “I always liked —’s sermons,” naming the author from whom it was taken. Never did poor jackdaw feel so much pain at being divested of his borrowed plumage.

One of the ablest men, although a mumbling kind of preacher, in those times, was the Rev. Mr. Kidd, who was for so many years one of the curates of Liverpool, a kind of Church serf, who could never rise to be a Church ruler. He had many kind friends, and at many a table which we could mention a plate and knife and fork were always laid for the poor curate. But he ever appeared to us to be an oppressed and depressed man, with a weight upon his spirits which nothing could shake off. There was indeed a romance attached to his history, although he was perhaps the most unromantic looking person that the human eye ever rested upon. He was a brilliant scholar, when a student at Brasenose College, Oxford, and his hopes and ambition naturally aspired to a fellowship. It was supposed to be within his grasp. But how wide is the distance between the cup and the lip! The principal was unpopular, and some of his doings were severely flogged in a satirical poem which appeared without a name. Its cleverness led him to suspect Mr. Kidd, and, without looking for any other proof of the authorship, he became his sworn enemy, and used all his influence, and only too successfully, to turn the election against him. Some love affair, we have also heard, but this was, it may be, only “one of the tales of our grand-father,” went wrong with him about the same time. So that, altogether, he was thrown upon the world a sad and downcast man, with blighted hopes and blasted expectations from his very youth, and settled down into the curacy of Liverpool, where he saw more than one generation of inferior men, inferior in scholarship, in learning, in wit, in all and everything, promoted over his head. A pleasant, agreeable, quaint and original companion was poor Kidd amongst his intimates, but tongue-tied in a large party. He saw through the hollowness of the world, and despised it. There was nobody like him for unmasking a sham, and reducing a pretender to his real and proper dimensions. And then his chuckling laugh when he had accomplished such a feat, and impaled the human cockchafer upon the point of his sarcasm! And how bitterly he would allude to his curate’s poverty, as, smacking his lips over a glass of old port at some friend’s table, and he did not dislike his glass of port, he would tell us that his own domestic allowance of the same was “to smell at the cork on a week-day, and to take a single glass to support him through his duties on a Sunday.” Poor fellow! Once upon a time, and such godsends did not often fall to his portion, he had married a couple among the higher orders, and received for it a banknote which perfectly dazzled him. Then came the marriage breakfast, then the marriage dinner. He was a guest at both, and perhaps took his share of the good things which were stirring. His way home was through the Haymarket. Another gentleman, whose path was in the same direction, hearing a great noise, came up and found our friend fighting furiously for his fee with a lamp-post, and exclaiming, as he struck it with his stick, “You want to rob me of it, you scoundrel, do you? But come on, we’ll see!” He was a relation of the celebrated Dr. Kidd, who wrote one of the Bridgewater treatises, and who lately died at Oxford full of years and honours.

Another well-known clergyman in those days was the Rev. Mr. Moss, who was afterwards vicar of Walton for so many years. His share of “the drum ecclesiastic” was decidedly the drum stick. But, although a very moderate performer in the pulpit, he had a very good standing in society, and was very much liked in his own “set.” Not over witty himself, never was man the cause of so much wit in others, and often at his own expense. He was known in his own circle as “Old England,” because “he expected every man to do his duty;” that is, he never met a brother clergyman by any chance without seizing upon him, and asking him if he could do his duty on the next Sunday. In allusion to his convivial qualities and bad preaching, somebody once said of him that “he was better in the bottle than in the wood.” This gave him such dreadful offence that he positively consulted his lawyer on the subject of prosecuting the impious blasphemer for a libel. The answer to his enquiry was a hearty laugh on the part of the solicitor himself, with an intimation that he would be laughed out of court also, amidst a shower of jokes about the poet’s description of the Oxonians of that day,

“Steeped in old prejudice and older port,”

and be poked with all sorts of fun about _canting_, _recanting_, and _decanting_. The decanter triumphed, although it was a strong allusion to the original offending joke, and the idea of a prosecution was abandoned.

Mr. Moss had an intense horror of all sorts of innovations, and, in the case of the first railway, that between Manchester and Liverpool, this feeling was greatly increased by the fact of his being a large shareholder in a certain canal which might be affected by its success. He was in a fever of excitement and almost raved whenever the subject was mentioned in company. He long clung to the notion that the accomplishment of the line was impossible and fabulous. He magnified every difficulty, dwelt upon every obstacle, and concluded every harangue on the question with the triumphant exclamation, “But, never mind, they cannot do it; Chat Moss will stop it; Chat Moss will stop it.” This was said in allusion to that great boggy waste, so called, which for so long a time did really battle with and baffle the skill and efforts of the engineers. On one occasion, when our friend had been holding forth in his usual strain, and finished with a look of defiance at all around him, “_Chat Moss will stop it_,” Mr. Thomas Crowther, who was one of the party, quietly answered, “Depend upon it, your _chat_, _Moss_, will not stop it.” This to us is the purest essence of wit, the very _ne plus ultra_ism of it.

“The force of humour can no further go.”

Like Pitt’s description of what a battle should be, “it is sharp, short, and decisive.” It is brilliant, pointed, telling.

There is a joke of almost a similar kind in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_. “I told him” (writes the former) “of one of Mr. Burke’s playful sallies upon Dean Marley: ‘I don’t like the Deanery of Ferns, it sounds so like a _barren_ title.’ ‘Dr. _Heath_ should have it,’ said I. Johnson laughed, and, condescending to trifle in the same mode of conceit, suggested Dr. _Moss_.” But the wit here is overdone and wire-drawn, until it becomes forced, heavy, and exhausted. Crowther’s _extempore_ retort beats the laboured efforts of Burke, Boswell, and Johnson, all put together, as it bursts forth, sparkling, glittering, dazzling, on the spur of the moment. “Depend upon it, your _chat_, _Moss_, will not stop it.” We treasure a good thing when we hear it, and love to embalm it. Mr. Crowther, the author of this unrivalled witticism, had a twinkle about the eye which seemed to say for him, that he had many “a shot in the locker,” of equal calibre and ready for action. We did not know much of him ourselves, but have always been told that his stores of humour and wit were as rich as they were inexhaustible. The specimen, or, as men say in Liverpool, the sample, which we have given amply justifies such an opinion.

We must not forget to mention, in connection with the Rev. G. H. Piercy, that of the sons of Liverpool worthies under his care in 1804, and who thumbed their lexicons with redoubled zeal when promised a holiday to witness the marching and counter-marching of the “brave army” before his Royal Highness Prince William of Gloucester, in Mosslake fields or Bankhall Sands, (where are these now?) the following, although in the “sere and yellow leaf,” are still fit for active service:—W. C. Ritson, E. Molyneux, Thomas Brandreth, F. Haywood, R. W. Preston, and James Boardman. The Rev. James Aspinall, rector of Althorpe, Lincolnshire, was also long a favourite pupil of the reverend patriarch.