Who fetches you your silks, and your linens, and your
wines, and all the other necessaries of life?
I speak chiefly with regard to the sailors.”
“You should say the extravagancies of life,”
replied the parson; “but admit they were the
necessaries, there is something more necessary than
life itself, which is provided by learning; I mean
the learning of the clergy. Who clothes you with
piety, meekness, humility, charity, patience, and
all the other Christian virtues? Who feeds your
souls with the milk of brotherly love, and diets them
with all the dainty food of holiness, which at once
cleanses them of all impure carnal affections, and
fattens them with the truly rich spirit of grace?
Who doth this?” “Ay, who, indeed?”
cries the host; “for I do not remember ever
to have seen any such clothing or such feeding.
And so, in the mean time, master, my service to you.”
Adams was going to answer with some severity, when
Joseph and Fanny returned and pressed his departure
so eagerly that he would not refuse them; and so, grasping
his crabstick, he took leave of his host (neither
of them being so well pleased with each other as they
had been at their first sitting down together), and
with Joseph and Fanny, who both expressed much impatience,
departed, and now all together renewed their journey.
BOOK III.
CHAPTER I.
Matter prefatory in praise of biography.
Notwithstanding the preference which may be vulgarly
given to the authority of those romance writers who
entitle their books “the History of England,
the History of France, of Spain, &c.,” it is
most certain that truth is to be found only in the
works of those who celebrate the lives of great men,
and are commonly called biographers, as the others
should indeed be termed topographers, or chorographers;
words which might well mark the distinction between
them; it being the business of the latter chiefly
to describe countries and cities, which, with the
assistance of maps, they do pretty justly, and may
be depended upon; but as to the actions and characters
of men, their writings are not quite so authentic,
of which there needs no other proof than those eternal
contradictions occurring between two topographers who
undertake the history of the same country: for
instance, between my Lord Clarendon and Mr Whitelocke,
between Mr Echard and Rapin, and many others; where,
facts being set forth in a different light, every reader
believes as he pleases; and, indeed, the more judicious
and suspicious very justly esteem the whole as no
other than a romance, in which the writer hath indulged
a happy and fertile invention. But though these
widely differ in the narrative of facts; some ascribing
victory to the one, and others to the other party;
some representing the same man as a rogue, while others
give him a great and honest character; yet all agree
in the scene where the fact is supposed to have happened,
