Where England Sets Her Feet, A Romance

Excerpt: “When, in the second year of Elizabeth, the Act of Supremacy was passed, there were found only some two hundred in all of the clergy bold enough to dissent from it. Many, it is true, who conformed, did so without sincerity, fearing to lose their livings, and of these was Mr Robert Angell, Vicar of Clapham, or Clappenham village in Surrey, which was in the advowson of the lords of Larkhall and a very good cure. This Mr Angell, a worthy but weak divine, gained nothing, however, by his accommodation, for being suspected, whether rightly or wrongly, of Romanist sympathies, he was shortly deprived of his benefice, and forced to look elsewhere than to the Establishment for a means to subsistence. In this pass he bethought himself to set up a little private school, or palestra, for the sons of such of his neighbours as were well disposed towards him; and this he did, and with fair success, many coming to receive of him their early grounding in the A.B.C.-darius, Lily’s grammar, the Sententiæ Pueriles, and so on by way of Erasmus’s Colloquies to Cæsar and the Georgics, so that they were well ripe for College and University when their time came. For the Vicar was a sound scholar no less than an amiable man, and ruled by love without much authority, being little addicted to the harsh methods which obtained, and indeed were expected, in his day. He had a dame, a stupid woman but as benevolent as himself, and two or three little children, who tumbled up anyhow and were for ever in hot water, save when they most needed it."