Neither can we forget Brentford's Titanic visitor, magnificently verbose, looming at his extraordinary height, with a fund of simplicity and gentleness hidden somewhere beneath that generous exterior. How guileless he was, how tender!--"invaluable at a tragedy." The petition which Mr. Thomas Prince delivered in the Old South would have fallen with equal grace from N.'s lips:--
"O Lord! we would not advise; But if, in Thy Providence, A tempest should arise And drive the French fleet hence, And scatter it far and wide, And sink it in the sea, We should be satisfied, And Thine the glory be!"
With what fervor, two parts patriotism, one part innocence, would N. have pronounced that mischievous supplication!
His conscientiousness carried him once a little too far; and the sequel "dimmed these spectacles," as Thackeray used to say. It was to us the funniest thing that ever happened in sacred precincts,--funny beyond all power of endurance.
"When Solomon finished the Temple," said the Reverend N., in his sonorous tones,--"when Solomon finished the Temple he sacrificed one hundred and twenty thousand sheep and twenty-two thousand oxen." Now, that was incontestable. But immediately a wretched little doubt crept in upon his Biblical assertion. "Seventy thousand--ur--ur--twenty thousand sheep," continued the Reverend N., "twenty hundred thousand ox--ahem! I mean two hundred thousand, a hundred and twenty--ur--[very slow and deliberate reiteration]: two and twenty thousand oxen, one hundred and twenty thousand sheep." When the last sheep came on the scene we were suffering from agonies of laughter. Let us trust that they turned their meek and startled eyes another way.
There was H., too, a white-haired logician who had proved everything, from the Creation down to the principles of good and evil in the most neglected "queer small boy;" E., drawing exquisite homely illustrations from the sea; and gracious little B., the polished rhetorician, most deferent in his manners of address, most scrupulously reliant on the sense and rectitude of those around him.
"Honor and reverence and good repute" be with them all now, wheresoever they may labor or rest. We think sometimes we have heard Cyril and Polycarp among them.