You will say that there ought to be many good stories of a people like
the Manx; and here again I have to confess to you that the absence of
all literary conscience, all perception of keeping and relation, all
sense of harmony and congruity in the Manxman has so demoralised our
anecdotal _ana_ that I hesitate to offer you certain of the best of
our Manx yarns from fear that they may be venerable English, Irish, and
Scotch familiars. I will content myself with a few that bear undoubted
Manx lineaments. As an instance of Manx hospitality, simple and rude,
but real and hearty, I think you would go the world over to match this.
The late Rev. Hugh Stowell Brown, a Manxman, brother of the most famous
of living Manxmen, and himself our North-country Spurgeon, with his
wife, his sister, and his mother, were belated one evening up Baldwin
Glen, and stopped at a farm-house to inquire their way. But the farmer
would not hear of their going a step further. "Aw, nonsense!" he said.
"What's the use of talkin', man? You'll be stoppin' with us to-night.
Aw 'deed ye will, though. The women can get along together aisy, and
_you're a clane lookin' sort o' chap; you'll be sleepin' with me!_"
In the old days of, say, two steamboats a week to England the old Manx
captains of the Steamboat Company were notorious soakers. There is a
story of one of them who had the Archdeacon of the island aboard in a
storm. It was night. The reverend Archdeacon was in an agony of pain and
terror. He inquired anxiously of the weather. The captain, very drunk,
answered, "If it doesn't mend we'll all be in heaven before morning,
Archdeacon!" "Oh, God forbid, captain," cried the Archdeacon.
I have said what true work for religion Nonconformity must have done
in those evil days when the clergy of the Athols were more busy with
backgammon than with theology. But the religion of the old type of Manx
Methodist was often an amusing mixture of puritanism and its opposite,
a sort of grim, white-faced sanctity, that was never altogether free of
the suspicion of a big boisterous laugh behind it. The Methodist local
preachers have been the real guardians and repositories of one side
of the Manx genius, a curious, hybrid thing, deadly earnest, often
howlingly ludicrous, simple, generally sincere, here and there
audaciously hypocritical. Among local preachers I remember some of the
sweetest, purest, truest men that ever walked this world of God; but
I also remember a > man who was brought home from market on Saturday
night, dead drunk, across the bottom of his cart drawn by his faithful
horse, and I saw him in the pulpit next morning, and heard his sermon on
the evils of backsliding. There is a story of the jealousy of two local
preachers. The one went to hear the other preach. The preacher laid out
his subject under a great many heads, firstly, secondly, thirdly, up to
tenthly. His rival down below in the pew spat and _haw'd_ and _tchut'd_
a good deal, and at last, quite impatient of getting no solid religious
food, cried aloud, "Give us mate, man, give us mate!" Whereupon the
preacher leaned over the pulpit cushion, and said, "Hould on, man, till
I've done with the carving."
But to tell of Happy Dan, and his wondrous sermon on the Prodigal Son
at the Clover Stones, Lonan, and his discourse on the swine possessed
of devils who went "triddle-traddle, triddle-traddle down the brews and
were clane drownded;" and of the marvellous account of how King David
remonstrated in broadest Manx _patois_ with the "pozzle-tree," for being
blown down; and then of the grim earnestness of a good man who could
never preach on a certain text without getting wet through to the
waistcoat with perspiration--to open the flood-gates of this kind of
Manx story would be to liberate a reservoir that would hardly know an
end, so I must spare you.