The Botathen Ghost

There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the

clergy in the west of England throughout the seventeenth century. The

Church of those days was in a transitory state, and her ministers, like

her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the

new interpretation. Their wide severance also from the great metropolis

of life and manners, the city of London (which in those times was

civilized England, much as the Paris of our own day is France), divested

the Cornish clergy in particular of all personal access to the

master-minds of their age and body. Then, too, the barrier interposed by

the rude rough roads of their country, and by their abode in wilds that

were almost inaccessible, rendered the existence of a bishop rather a

doctrine suggested to their belief than a fact revealed to the actual

vision of each in his generation. Hence it came to pass that the Cornish

clergyman, insulated within his own limited sphere, often without even

the presence of a country squire (and unchecked by the influence of the

Fourth Estate--for until the beginning of this nineteenth century,

_Flindell's Weekly Miscellany_, distributed from house to house from the

pannier of a mule, was the only light of the West), became developed

about middle life into an original mind and man, sole and absolute within

his parish boundary, eccentric when compared with his brethren in

civilized regions, and yet, in German phrase, 'a whole and seldom man' in

his dominion of souls. He was 'the parson', in canonical phrase--that is

to say, The Person, the somebody of consequence among his own people.

These men were not, however, smoothed down into a monotonous aspect of

life and manners by this remote and secluded existence