accrued to him through his wife. He had now reached the age of
twenty-two, and had been three years married.

During the residence in the metropolis which succeeded, he frequented the
theatres, and came thus in contact with a field where he was to gather
his earliest and most untarnished laurels. In "The Rosciad," we find the
results of several years' keen and close observation of the actors of the
period, collected into one focus, and pointed and irradiated by the power
of genius. As Scott, while carelessly galloping in his youth through
Liddesdale, and listening to ballads and old-world stories, was "making
himself" into the mighty minstrel of the border--so this big, clumsy,
overgrown student, seated in the pit of Drury Lane, or exalted to the
one-shilling gallery of Covent Garden, was silently growing into the
greatest poet of the stage that, perhaps, ever lived.

Soon after, he was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Bath and Wells, on
the curacy of Cadbury, in Somersetshire, where he immediately removed,
and entered on a career of active ministerial work. Such were the golden
opinions he gained in Cadbury, that, in 1756, although he had taken no
degree, nor could be said to have studied at either of the universities,
he was ordained priest by Dr Sherlock, the Bishop of London (celebrated
for his Sermons and his "Trial of the Witnesses"), on his father's curacy
of Rainham, Essex. Here he continued diligent in his pastoral
duties--blameless in his conduct, and attentive to his theological
studies. He seemed to have entirely escaped from the suction of the
stage--to have forsworn the Muses, and to have turned the eye of his
ambition away from the peaks of Parnassus to the summit of the Bishops'
Bench.

But for Churchill's poor circumstances, it is likely that he would have