1827.] [ 463 ] 



FULL-LENGTHS. K VI. 



The Ship-Clergyman* 



WE approach our subject with a degree of timidity ; we crave the most 

 charitable consideration of our readers. The matter to be discussed is at 

 once both delicate and difficult. Fine hair-strokes, and softly-mingling 

 colours are here imperatively requisite ; we must venture no bold outline 

 a hurried touch would instantly destroy our subject, as well as hand us over 

 to the scorching accusation of a reckless disrespect. We are, in sooth upon 

 our very best behaviour. 



As we always like, whenever it is possible, to lean upon the huge-nobbed 

 stick of philosophy, we shall here for a brief space rest upon the weapon. 

 It is well known that matter exposed to the sea air undergoes, in many 

 instances, a variety of transformations; blacking and bottled porter ar 

 particularly affected by a long marine voyage : but of all the changes 

 worked by the ocean and indeed we could heap the page up with 

 instances > of all its manifold operations, none are so strikingly peculiar as 

 those upon a son of the church. It is really wonderful to contemplate the 

 character the now tincture given to orthodoxy by a voyage in a man- 

 of-war to the West Indies. There is or ought to be in the bearing of 

 every land clergyman, a kind of dignified suavity a sweetness, yet still a 

 dignified placability. Now, this dignity, which, indeed, we have frequently 

 heard censured by the superficial and unthinking as clerical starch, we 

 rather call gum, " medicinal gum," at once imparting a strength and a 

 gratefulness to the clerical character. Now, of this moral gum our ship- 

 clergyman hath not an atom ; the sea air hath wholly annihilated it the 

 salient particles have utterly destroyed it, returning at the same time a less 

 artificial rigidity to the character of the despoiled. We think if it were 

 possible to feed a man upon musk, the excess of sweetness would render 

 him an idiot. Is there not, however, other musk than that bought in 

 packages at the perfumer's ? Let us consider it philosophically ; and what 

 are the hourly obeisances, the half-breathed replies, the continual cringings 

 cf deference, but so much civet curling up from the altars of the dependent 

 to the nostrils of the patronizing ? The nose of nearly every man is greeted 

 more or less with this daily odour, which, steaming to the brain, there 

 imparts a deceptive principle of strength, which, christened in the meekest 

 name of passion's vocabulary, is called confidence. We know it may 

 take a hundred different appellations folly, rashness, conceit according to 

 the original power of the organ it enshrouds. Now every member, from the 

 bishop from him who hath lawn sleeves to the hard-working journeyman 

 of the church, who can scarcely obtain linen for attire of any kind every 

 one of these hath, in his degree, a corresponding deference paid to him, 

 from which results a peculiar, and truly clerical dignity. Now our ship- 

 clergyman, having no marked distinction paid to him by supple humanity, 

 his moral man undergoes a progressive yet certain change, and whilst 

 feelings and ideas are at work within, the elements busy themselves 

 both in his intellectual and physical powers. We must here attempt a 

 contrast. 



We can readily figure to ourselves a clergyman, confirmed an oracle of 

 ,iis village-* ihe grand arbiter of all disputes the peace-maker and the pet 

 in families the grand lexicon for the unlettered. How different the 



