shaped quite differently: he would very likely
have taken a comely wife in his youth, and now, when his hair was getting grey
under the powder, would have had tall sons and blooming daughters - such
possessions, in short, as men commonly think will repay them for all the labour
they take under the sun. As it was - having with all his three livings no more
than seven hundred a-year, and seeing no way of keeping his splendid mother and
his sickly sister, not to reckon a second sister, who was usually spoken of
without any adjective, in such lady-like ease as became their birth and habits,
and at the same time providing for a family of his own - he remained, you see,
at the age of eight-and-forty, a bachelor, not making any merit of that
renunciation, but saying laughingly, if any one alluded to it, that he made it
an excuse for many indulgences which a wife would never have allowed him. And
perhaps he was the only person in the world who did not think his sisters
uninteresting and superfluous; for his was one of those large-hearted,
sweetblooded natures that never know a narrow or a grudging thought; epicurean,
if you will, with no enthusiasm, no self-scourging sense of duty; but yet, as
you have seen, of a sufficiently subtle moral fibre to have an unwearying
tenderness for obscure and monotonous suffering. It was his large-hearted
indulgence that made him ignore his mother's hardness towards her daughters,
which was the more striking from its contrast with her doting fondness towards
himself: he held it no virtue to frown at irremediable faults.
    See the difference between the impression a man makes on you when you walk
by his side in familiar talk, or look at him in his home, and the figure he
makes when seen from a lofty historical level, or even in the eyes of a critical
neighbour who thinks of him as an embodied system or opinion rather than as a
man. Mr. Roe, the »travelling preacher« stationed at Treddleston, had included
Mr. Irwine in a general statement concerning the Church clergy in the
surrounding district, whom he described as men given up to the lusts of the
flesh and the pride of life; hunting and shooting, and adorning their own
houses; asking what shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall
we be clothed? - careless of dispensing the bread of life to their flocks,
preaching at best but a carnal and soul-benumbing morality, and trafficking in
the souls of