in preferring an income ready made, to the
trouble of working for one; and has the best intentions of doing nothing all the
rest of his days but eat, drink, and grow fat. It is indolence Mr. Bertram,
indeed. Indolence and love of ease - a want of all laudable ambition, of taste
for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable,
which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but to be slovenly and
selfish - read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His
curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine.«
    »There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so common as
to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character. I suspect that
in this comprehensive and (may I say) common-place censure, you are not judging
from yourself, but from prejudiced persons, whose opinions you have been in the
habit of hearing. It is impossible that your own observation can have given you
much knowledge of the clergy. You can have been personally acquainted with very
few of a set of men you condemn so conclusively. You are speaking what you have
been told at your uncle's table.
    I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is
general, it is usually correct. Though I have not seen much of the domestic
lives of clergymen, it is seen by too many to leave any deficiency of
information.«
    »Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned
indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or (smiling) of
something else. Your uncle, and his brother admirals, perhaps, knew little of
clergymen beyond the chaplains whom, good or bad, they were always wishing
away.«
    »Poor William! He has met with great kindness from the chaplain of the
Antwerp,« was a tender apostrophe of Fanny's, very much to the purpose of her
own feelings, if not of the conversation.
    »I have been so little addicted to take my opinions from my uncle,« said
Miss Crawford, »that I can hardly suppose; - and since you push me so hard, I
must observe, that I am not entirely without the means of seeing what clergymen
are, being at this present time the guest of my own brother, Dr. Grant. And
though Dr. Grant is most kind and obliging to me, and though he is really a
gentleman, and I dare say a good