The Rev. William Barker Daniel 



LAYMEN have ever had a kindly feeling for the sporting 

 parson, though, if the truth must be told, he has not 

 always been a credit to his cloth or an ornament to 

 society. The jolly, shovel -hatted rector who loved 

 port wine and a good dinner, who was not ashamed to 

 patronise a prize-fight or a cocking match, and was 

 more at home on the racecourse or in the hunting- 

 field than at a religious meeting or a clerical conference, 

 who could swear, if need be, a good, round, honest oath, 

 and whose wife wrote his sermons for him, was a popular 

 personage a hundred years ago and less. Thackeray 

 has drawn his portrait in the Rev. Bute Crawley, and 

 one likes the man, at any rate, far better than that 

 evangelical prig his nephew, the correct and loathsomely 

 respectable Mr. Pitt Crawley. In an age when manners 

 were coarse and morals lax, it soothed the consciences of 

 easy-going folks to have clerical countenance for their 

 pet vices, to feel that their spiritual pastors were 



creatures not too bright or good 

 For human nature's daily food, 



but full-blooded mortals who could eat and drink and 

 shoot and hunt and fish and fight and swear with the 



108 



