misfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man out from the
large sympathetic knowledge of human experience which comes from contact
with various classes on their own level, and in my father's time that
entail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. To
look always from overhead at the crowd of one's fellow-men must be in
many ways incapacitating, even with the best will and intelligence. The
serious blunders it must lead to in the effort to manage them for their
good, one may see clearly by the mistaken ways people take of flattering
and enticing those whose associations are unlike their own. Hence I have
always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose
experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the
national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing
it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them,
and getting acquainted with their notions and motives not by inference
from traditional types in literature or from philosophical theories, but
from daily fellowship and observation. Of course such experience is apt
to get antiquated, and my father might find himself much at a loss
amongst a mixed rural population of the present day; but he knew very
well what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, the
field-labourers, and farmers of his own time--yes, and from the
aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and
had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "A
clergyman, lad," he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit of
every class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his
inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved
by his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards him; but
what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe
included, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look
well after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind about his
money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of fat central