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Untitled Article
your lordship would have approved it . But these are thou ghts that produce no means of subsistence . To feel a strong sympathy , —not a mere verbal one—with the greatest writers of truth and power , is no earnest of worldly means , ( the contrary , if we may judge by all their fates , ) even could I have presumed to suppose myself capable of effecting aught worthy of distant comparison with them . I therefore thought myself most fortunate in obtaining this curacy , I consider it a disproportionate calamity , now that I have a famil y to provide for , to be deprived of it .
But suffer me , my lord , to conclude my story . I fear it has already wearied you . I will briefly relate the climax of my sufferings . I may even do so abruptly , for it is too harrowing to dwell upon . The memory of it shakes my tree of manhood to the remotest verge of its deep-spreading roots ; but my pillow is wetted with few tears : I dread lest my beloved wife should discover the stains .
My son had scarcely been a twelvemonth in his employment at Oxford , when he accidentally discovered that the junior partner of the house , was defrauding the firm by a subtle and nefarious manoeuvre . My son openly charged him with the fact , in the presence of the others . He denied it with cool effrontery , and
called on my son for his proofs . The chief witness was adduced he had been suborned to give a false statement . Certain letters were referred to : they could not be found ! My son ' s indignation at this , occasioned him to make many more animadversions touching , or rather trenching , the character of the junior partner , and
an action was brought against him immediately for defamation . Convinced of my son ' s entire rectitude , I determined to defend the action . To be right in feeling and moral principle , is almost always to be wrong in law . I never had any experience of the fact but this once , ( which was a fatal one , ) but have grieved with an indignant spleen over unnumbered cases of wrong done to
others . The action was tried , and lost . The damages awarded to the plaintiff were such as to sweep away the whole sum lodged with the firm as my poor boy ' s security ; who seeing me thus stript of everything , with the liability to further demands , by a remorseless and exasperating injustice , and himself thrown a wreck upon the world , or obliged to return upon the hard-earned
meagre resources of his parents , in the first impulse of his agony , shot himself through the heart ! The news first stunned me in the village , and I found myself in the dizzy streets of Oxford , as from the strange transition of a throbbing dream , out of which I could not awake to clear vision or perception of things , or even personal consciousness . The coroner sat in judgment over the cold corpse of my boy ! The spirit of the father rose up within me in towering judgment against all conventions—pleading his cause before God . But my apprehensions were premature . By the humane compromise of meta-
Untitled Article
468 Letter from a Country Curate
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1834, page 468, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2635/page/8/
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