The Church, in the days we are speaking of, was in a very torpid and
sleepy state, not only in Liverpool, but throughout the land. None of
the evangelical clergy had then appeared in this district, to stimulate
the pace of the old-fashioned jog-trot High Churchmen. Neither had
Laudism revived, under its new name of Puseyism. Nothing was heard from
our pulpits but what might have passed muster at Athens, or been preached
without offence in the great Mosque of Constantinople. In fact, “Extract
of Blair” was the dose administered, Sunday after Sunday, by drowsy
teachers to drowsy congregations. If it did no harm, it did no good. We
do not here speak of James Blair, Commissary of Virginia, President of
William and Mary College, etc., whose works, little known, contain a mine
of theological wealth. We allude to Dr. Hugh Blair, whose sermons, so
celebrated in his day and long after, are really, when analysed, nothing
better than a string of cold moral precepts, mixed up with a few gaudy
flowers culled from the garden of rhetoric. We have often wondered at
the praise beyond measure which Dr. Johnson again and again bestowed upon
Blair’s diluted slip-slop and namby-pamby trifles. He not only spoke of
them in the highest terms on every occasion, but thus, in his strange
way, once exclaimed, “I love Blair’s sermons. Though the dog is a
Scotchman, and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not be, I was the
first to praise them. Such was my candour.” At all events, as we have
already stated, “Extract of Blair” was the pulpit panacea universally
prescribed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And we are bound
to add, as far as our youthful recollections go, that the majority of the
Liverpool clergy in those days were rather below than above the average
of mediocrity.
There were some among them, however, whose names are worth recalling.
One of the best preachers in those old times was the incumbent of St.
Stephen’s, Byrom-street, the Rev. G. H. Piercy, a fine fellow in every
way. He is still alive at his living of Chaddesley, in Worcestershire,
to which he was presented through the influence of old Queen Charlotte.
His mother-in-law, the wife of the Rev. Mr. Sharp, then vicar of
Childwall, had been about the court in some capacity or other, and it was
the good fashion of her Majesty never to forget her friends. Mr. Piercy
must have reached the age of the patriarchs at least. Then there was the
Rev. Mr. Milner, of St. Catharine’s Church, Temple-street, which was
removed in making some improvements in that part of the town. Poor Mr.
Milner! When not washing his hands, he employed each hour of the day in
running after the hour before, and was always losing ground in the race.
A kind-hearted man he was, and a pleasant one when you could catch him.
He was known as “the late Mr. Milner.” The Rev. Mr. Vause preached in
those days at Christ Church. He was considered to be a brilliant star in
the pulpit, and was indeed a first-rate scholar, a fellow-student with
the illustrious Canning, who made many and strong efforts to reclaim him
from a course of life which unhappily contradicted and marred all his
Sunday teachings. But, even with regard to his sermons, effective and
telling as they were made by style, voice and manner, it was found, after
his death, when they passed into other hands, that they were chiefly
Blair, with others copied from the popular writers of the day. A
clergyman, who was to preach before the Archbishop of York, had the
choice of them for the occasion. He picked out the one which seemed to
him to be the most spicy and telling, and, confident at the time that it
was the production of Vause himself, delivered it with mighty emphasis
and stunning effect. When it was over, the Archbishop blandly smiled,
praised it exceedingly, and then, to the horror and astonishment of the
preacher, whispered, “I always liked —’s sermons,” naming the author from
whom it was taken. Never did poor jackdaw feel so much pain at being
divested of his borrowed plumage.
One of the ablest men, although a mumbling kind of preacher, in those
times, was the Rev. Mr. Kidd, who was for so many years one of the
curates of Liverpool, a kind of Church serf, who could never rise to be a
Church ruler. He had many kind friends, and at many a table which we
could mention a plate and knife and fork were always laid for the poor
curate. But he ever appeared to us to be an oppressed and depressed man,
with a weight upon his spirits which nothing could shake off. There was
indeed a romance attached to his history, although he was perhaps the
most unromantic looking person that the human eye ever rested upon. He
was a brilliant scholar, when a student at Brasenose College, Oxford, and
his hopes and ambition naturally aspired to a fellowship. It was
supposed to be within his grasp. But how wide is the distance between
the cup and the lip! The principal was unpopular, and some of his doings
were severely flogged in a satirical poem which appeared without a name.
Its cleverness led him to suspect Mr. Kidd, and, without looking for any
other proof of the authorship, he became his sworn enemy, and used all
his influence, and only too successfully, to turn the election against
him. Some love affair, we have also heard, but this was, it may be, only
“one of the tales of our grand-father,” went wrong with him about the
same time. So that, altogether, he was thrown upon the world a sad and
downcast man, with blighted hopes and blasted expectations from his very
youth, and settled down into the curacy of Liverpool, where he saw more
than one generation of inferior men, inferior in scholarship, in
learning, in wit, in all and everything, promoted over his head. A
pleasant, agreeable, quaint and original companion was poor Kidd amongst
his intimates, but tongue-tied in a large party. He saw through the
hollowness of the world, and despised it. There was nobody like him for
unmasking a sham, and reducing a pretender to his real and proper
dimensions. And then his chuckling laugh when he had accomplished such a
feat, and impaled the human cockchafer upon the point of his sarcasm!
And how bitterly he would allude to his curate’s poverty, as, smacking
his lips over a glass of old port at some friend’s table, and he did not
dislike his glass of port, he would tell us that his own domestic
allowance of the same was “to smell at the cork on a week-day, and to
take a single glass to support him through his duties on a Sunday.” Poor
fellow! Once upon a time, and such godsends did not often fall to his
portion, he had married a couple among the higher orders, and received
for it a banknote which perfectly dazzled him. Then came the marriage
breakfast, then the marriage dinner. He was a guest at both, and perhaps
took his share of the good things which were stirring. His way home was
through the Haymarket. Another gentleman, whose path was in the same
direction, hearing a great noise, came up and found our friend fighting
furiously for his fee with a lamp-post, and exclaiming, as he struck it
with his stick, “You want to rob me of it, you scoundrel, do you? But
come on, we’ll see!” He was a relation of the celebrated Dr. Kidd, who
wrote one of the Bridgewater treatises, and who lately died at Oxford
full of years and honours.
Another well-known clergyman in those days was the Rev. Mr. Moss, who was
afterwards vicar of Walton for so many years. His share of “the drum
ecclesiastic” was decidedly the drum stick. But, although a very
moderate performer in the pulpit, he had a very good standing in society,
and was very much liked in his own “set.” Not over witty himself, never
was man the cause of so much wit in others, and often at his own expense.
He was known in his own circle as “Old England,” because “he expected
every man to do his duty;” that is, he never met a brother clergyman by
any chance without seizing upon him, and asking him if he could do his
duty on the next Sunday. In allusion to his convivial qualities and bad
preaching, somebody once said of him that “he was better in the bottle
than in the wood.” This gave him such dreadful offence that he
positively consulted his lawyer on the subject of prosecuting the impious
blasphemer for a libel. The answer to his enquiry was a hearty laugh on
the part of the solicitor himself, with an intimation that he would be
laughed out of court also, amidst a shower of jokes about the poet’s
description of the Oxonians of that day,
“Steeped in old prejudice and older port,”
and be poked with all sorts of fun about _canting_, _recanting_, and
_decanting_. The decanter triumphed, although it was a strong allusion
to the original offending joke, and the idea of a prosecution was
abandoned.
Mr. Moss had an intense horror of all sorts of innovations, and, in the
case of the first railway, that between Manchester and Liverpool, this
feeling was greatly increased by the fact of his being a large
shareholder in a certain canal which might be affected by its success.
He was in a fever of excitement and almost raved whenever the subject was
mentioned in company. He long clung to the notion that the
accomplishment of the line was impossible and fabulous. He magnified
every difficulty, dwelt upon every obstacle, and concluded every harangue
on the question with the triumphant exclamation, “But, never mind, they
cannot do it; Chat Moss will stop it; Chat Moss will stop it.” This was
said in allusion to that great boggy waste, so called, which for so long
a time did really battle with and baffle the skill and efforts of the
engineers. On one occasion, when our friend had been holding forth in
his usual strain, and finished with a look of defiance at all around him,
“_Chat Moss will stop it_,” Mr. Thomas Crowther, who was one of the
party, quietly answered, “Depend upon it, your _chat_, _Moss_, will not
stop it.” This to us is the purest essence of wit, the very _ne plus
ultra_ism of it.
“The force of humour can no further go.”
Like Pitt’s description of what a battle should be, “it is sharp, short,
and decisive.” It is brilliant, pointed, telling.
There is a joke of almost a similar kind in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_.
“I told him” (writes the former) “of one of Mr. Burke’s playful sallies
upon Dean Marley: ‘I don’t like the Deanery of Ferns, it sounds so like a
_barren_ title.’ ‘Dr. _Heath_ should have it,’ said I. Johnson laughed,
and, condescending to trifle in the same mode of conceit, suggested Dr.
_Moss_.” But the wit here is overdone and wire-drawn, until it becomes
forced, heavy, and exhausted. Crowther’s _extempore_ retort beats the
laboured efforts of Burke, Boswell, and Johnson, all put together, as it
bursts forth, sparkling, glittering, dazzling, on the spur of the moment.
“Depend upon it, your _chat_, _Moss_, will not stop it.” We treasure a
good thing when we hear it, and love to embalm it. Mr. Crowther, the
author of this unrivalled witticism, had a twinkle about the eye which
seemed to say for him, that he had many “a shot in the locker,” of equal
calibre and ready for action. We did not know much of him ourselves, but
have always been told that his stores of humour and wit were as rich as
they were inexhaustible. The specimen, or, as men say in Liverpool, the
sample, which we have given amply justifies such an opinion.
We must not forget to mention, in connection with the Rev. G. H. Piercy,
that of the sons of Liverpool worthies under his care in 1804, and who
thumbed their lexicons with redoubled zeal when promised a holiday to
witness the marching and counter-marching of the “brave army” before his
Royal Highness Prince William of Gloucester, in Mosslake fields or
Bankhall Sands, (where are these now?) the following, although in the
“sere and yellow leaf,” are still fit for active service:—W. C. Ritson,
E. Molyneux, Thomas Brandreth, F. Haywood, R. W. Preston, and James
Boardman. The Rev. James Aspinall, rector of Althorpe, Lincolnshire, was
also long a favourite pupil of the reverend patriarch.