they did above thirty years since!"--Did the reader never encounter a
similar key-note, leading to a multitude of early and vivid
recollections? Those well-remembered tones, in like manner, brought
before my imagination numberless incidents and personages no longer
important, or no longer in existence. My scattered and once-loved
schoolmates, their characters and their various fortunes, passed in
rapid review before me; my schoolmaster, his wife, and all the gentry,
and heads of families, whose orderly attendance at divine service on
Sundays, while those well-remembered bells were "chiming for church,"
(but now gone and mouldering in the adjoining graves,) were again
presented to my perceptions! With what pomp and form they used to enter
and depart from their house of God! I still saw with the mind's eye the
widow Hogarth, and her maiden relative, Richardson, walking up the aisle
dressed in their silken sacks, their raised head-dresses, their black
hoods, their lace ruffles, and their high-crook'd canes, preceded by
their aged servant, Samuel; who, after he had wheeled his mistress to
church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and
opened and shut the pew! There too was the portly Dr. Griffiths, of the
_Monthly Review_, with his literary wife in her neat and elevated
wire-winged cap! And oftimes the vivacious and angelic Duchess of
Devonshire, whose bloom had not then suffered from the canker-worm of
pecuniary distress, created by the luxury of charity! Nor could I forget
the humble distinction of the aged sexton, Mortefee, whose skill in
psalmody enabled him to lead that wretched group of singers, whom
Hogarth so happily portrayed; whose performance with the pitch-fork
excited so much wonder in little boys; and whose gesticulations and
contortions of head, hand, and body, in beating time, were not outdone
even by Joah Bates in the commemorations of Handel! Yes, simple and
happy villagers! I remember scores of you;--how fortunately ye had, and
still have, escaped the contagion of the metropolitan vices, though