 express either astonishment or dissatisfaction at being told he was both an arrant dunce and an arrant puppy. On the contrary, he sarcastically observed
"he would do well enough for a lord."

Having brought matters in the family of Lord Hazard to a sort of stand still, the reader and I will now, if he please, take a walk across the bridge into Roebuck park. But, upon recollection, being come now to the center which commands a view of the whole village of Castlewick, and its inhabitants making a part of our dramatis personae, we will take a short view of that little community, which had really something to recommend it to our notice.


THE village of Castlewick contained about five hundred inhabitants. About half the men and boys were generally employed at the trade of wool-combing; part of the women and girls in carding, spinning, twisting, and knitting; the more intelligent and experienced of the men in journeying to large towns to purchase sheep, and supply factors, clothiers, and hosiers with wool, yarn, worsted, stockings, nightcaps, socks, and such other articles as they manufactured. The lower order of the men and boys were employed in tilling, manuring, and enclosing; and the remainder of the women busied themselves in household affairs, buying and selling the necessaries of life, and such other occupations as the vicar—for this parish had no curate—pointed out to them.
The vicar had two deputies, the clerk and the schoolmaster; and these three were all the persons in the village who did no bodily labour:—for Castlewick

could boast neither lawyer, exciseman, nor apothecary.
Their good pastor undertook to regulate the temporal, as well as spiritual, concerns of his flock; and, by a scrupulous discharge of his duty as their treasurer, shewed them more than by a thousand precepts how much it was their interest to act with truth and integrity towards each other. Not that his preaching was not of a piece with his example, for every Sunday they heard some new lesson of sweet and comfortable morality from his mouth; for he, instead of describing religion as a denunciation of vengeance, and the deity as delighting in punishment, softened that high duty into a gentle and intelligent system of morality, by inculcating the principles of social virtue and brotherly love, and representing the creator as an indulgent father watching with anxious and tender care over the interest and happiness of his children, and regarding their virtuous endeavours with a smile of celestial benevolence:—thus troubling his hearers with nothing beyond the reach of that capacity which had fallen to their share, and leaving the
