The Reverend Augustin Ambrose would gladly have given
up taking pupils. He was growing old and his
sight was beginning to trouble him; he was very weary
of Thucydides, of Homer, of the works of Mr. Todhunter
of which the green bindings expressed a hope still
unrealised, of conic sections—even of his
beloved Horace. He was tired of the stupidities
of the dull young men who were sent to him because
they could not “keep up”, and he had long
ceased to be surprised or interested by the remarks
of the clever ones who were sent to him because their
education had not prepared them for an English University.
The dull ones could never be made to understand anything,
though Mr.
Ambrose generally succeeded in making them
remember enough to matriculate, by dint of ceaseless
repetition and a system of memoria technica
which embraced most things necessary to the salvation
of dull youth. The clever ones, on the other
hand, generally lacked altogether the solid foundation
of learning; they could construe fluently but did
not know a long syllable from a short one; they had
vague notions of elemental algebra and no notion at
all of arithmetic, but did very well in conic sections;
they knew nothing of prosody, but dabbled perpetually
in English blank verse; altogether they knew most
of those things which they need not have known and
they knew none of those things thoroughly which they
ought to have known. After twenty years of experience
Mr. Ambrose ascertained that it was easier to teach
a stupid boy than a clever one, but that he would prefer
not to teach at all.
Unfortunately the small tithes of a small country
parish in Essex did not furnish a sufficient income
for his needs. He had been a Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge, within a few years of taking his
degree, wherein he had obtained high honours.
But he had married and had found himself obliged to
accept the first living offered to him, to wit, the
vicarage of Billingsfield, whereof his college held
the rectory and received the great tithes. The
entire income he obtained from his cure never at any
time exceeded three hundred and forty-seven pounds,
and in the year when it reached that high figure there
had been an unusually large number of marriages.
It was not surprising that the vicar should desire
to improve his circumstances by receiving one or two
pupils. He had married young, as has been said,
and there had been children born to him, a son and
a daughter. Mrs. Ambrose was a good manager and
a good mother, and her husband had worked hard.
Between them they had brought up their children exceedingly
well. The son had in his turn entered the church,
had exhibited a faculty of pushing his way which had
not characterised his father, had got a curacy in
a fashionable Yorkshire watering-place, and was thought
to be on the way to obtain a first-rate living.
In the course of time, too, the daughter had lost her
Copyrights
A Tale of a Lonely Parish from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
