=Source.=—Lord Beaconsfield’s _Sybil_, bk. ii., chap. iii.
The situation of the rural town of Marney was one of the most
delightful easily to be imagined. In a spreading dale, contiguous to
the margin of a clear and lively stream, surrounded by meadows and
gardens and backed by lofty hills, undulating and richly wooded, the
traveller on the opposite heights of the dale would often stop to
admire the merry prospect, that recalled to him the traditional epithet
of his country.
Beautiful illusion! For behind that laughing landscape penury and
disease fed upon the vitals of a miserable population!
The contrast between the interior of the town and its external aspect
was as striking as it was full of pain. With the exception of the
dull high street, which had the usual characteristics of a small
agricultural market town, some sombre mansions, a dingy inn, and a
petty bourse, Marney mainly consisted of a variety of narrow and
crowded lanes formed by cottages built of rubble, or unhewn stones
without cement, and from age or badness of the material, looking as if
they could scarcely hold together. The gaping chinks admitted every
blast, the leaning chimneys had lost half their original height; the
rotten rafters were evidently misplaced; while in many instances the
thatch, yawning in some parts to admit the wind and wet, and in all
utterly unfit for its original purpose of giving protection from the
weather, looked more like the top of a dunghill than a cottage. Before
the doors of these dwellings, and often surrounding them, ran open
drains full of animal and vegetable refuse, decomposing into disease,
or sometimes in their imperfect course filling foul pits or spreading
into stagnant pools, while a concentrated solution of every species of
dissolving filth was allowed to soak through and thoroughly impregnate
the walls and ground adjoining.
These wretched tenements seldom consisted of more than two rooms, in
one of which the whole family, however numerous, were obliged to sleep,
without distinction of age, sex, or suffering.... The swarming walls
had neither windows nor doors sufficient to keep out the weather, or
admit the sun, or supply the means of ventilation; the humid and putrid
roof of thatch exhaling malaria like all other decaying vegetable
matter. The dwelling rooms were neither boarded nor paved....
This town of Marney was a metropolis of agricultural labour, for the
proprietors of the neighbourhood having for the last half century acted
on the system of destroying the cottages on their estates in order to
become exempted from the maintenance of the population, the expelled
people had flocked to Marney....
The eyes of this unhappy race might have been raised to the solitary
spire that sprang up in the midst of them, the bearer of present
consolation, the harbinger of future equality; but Holy Church at
Marney had forgotten her sacred mission. We have introduced the reader
to the vicar, an orderly man, who deemed he did his duty if he preached
each week two sermons, and enforced humility on the congregation, and
gratitude for the blessings of this life. The people of Marney took
refuge in conventicles, which abounded; little plain buildings of pale
brick, with the names painted on them of Sion, Bethel, Bethesda; names
of a distant land, and the language of a persecuted and ancient race;
yet such is the mysterious power of their divine quality, breathing
consolation in the nineteenth century to the harassed forms and the
harrowed souls of a Saxon peasantry.
But however devoted to his flock might have been the Vicar of Marney,
his exertions for their well-being, under any circumstances, must have
been mainly limited to spiritual consolation. Married and a father, he
received for his labours the small tithes of the parish, which secured
to him an income by no means equal to that of a superior banker’s
clerk, or the cook of a great loanmonger. The great tithes of Marney,
which might be counted by thousands, swelled the vast rental which was
drawn from this district by the fortunate earls that bore its name.