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Threescore and Ten Years, 1820-1890 (1894)
Threescore and Ten Years 18201890 - 1894 Author:William James Linton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Church Services; Landor; Carlton House; First Perversion; My First Friend; W. J. Huggins, Marine Painter to William IV.; Duncan; Wade; Home. Fr... more »om my father, the first Englishman of his race (his father was an Aberdeen ship-carpenter who settled in London as a builder, with fair pretension also to be called an architect), I perhaps inherited some tendency to radicalism; certainly not from my mother, who, my father not interfering, brought up myself and a younger brother and two sisters in the tenets of the Church of England, her utmost show of tolerance to send us small children on wet Sundays, when it was not fit for us to walk the more than a mile to'our parish church at West Ham, to a small Methodist chapel, only a few doors from home, which we called " Mamma's Little Meeting." I do not remember that she ever went there with us. Too young to be impressed with the Thirty- nine Articles, I was none the less endoctrinated in the Athanasian Creed and the special church services, of course including those in commemoration of the " Blessed Martyr," Charles I., and the happy restoration of his worthy son; and so fairly trained through all the ceremonials of the church as by law established. Excellent those commemorative services for the two Charleses if, as Walter Savage Landor observed, each could be changed for the other! After all, though England was not a gainer politically or morally by the accession of her easy-going crowned libertine, yet (as even a clergyman of the Established Church, J. Woodfall Ebsworth, the good vicar of Molash, Kent, once remarked to me) he had one saving grace, " he was not such a liar as his father." Perhaps to teach me some additional reverence for the contemporary loyalty, which, mean as it was, was not without blind loyal worshipers, ...« less