84 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



decided separateness from the world, which I have sought 

 to maintain ever since." 



Although his religious practice then, as ever afterwards, 

 was rigid and Puritanic to an unusual degree, he had a 

 seventeenth-century freshness in mingling the human mood 

 with the Divine. In letters of this period I find, side by 

 side with outpourings of devotion and aspirations after 

 godliness, quaint passages of simple humour. Philip Gosse 

 took his place in the singing gallery at the Wesleyan 

 Chapel, where his brother William led the instrumental 

 part with the first violin. " Other chaps," he remarks, 

 " and a few ladies swell the choir." One evening in the 

 week they met to practise in the gallery, and on a single 

 occasion, at least, he records that they all walked to Har- 

 bour Rock, a commanding eminence overlooking the port 

 of Carbonear, and clustering there, sang a hymn under the 

 summer stars before they separated. Two other of Elson's 

 clerks, who had become " serious," in like manner attached 

 themselves to the choir of the Established Church, and 

 practised there in the evenings. Gosse would often join 

 them, and the party would go home together. The old 

 parish clerk, one Loader, was a character. He kept a 

 school, but was quite illiterate. His office, of course, made 

 incumbent upon him a zealous Protestantism. He would 

 come to the counting-house, and glancing up at the Roman 

 Catholic chapel, with a patronising smile on the clerks, 

 would talk of " the misguided papishes, ye know ! " One 

 stormy Sunday the clergyman had not ventured over from 

 Harbour Grace, and Loader thought it a fine chance for 

 his own ministrations. He ran over to his house, close by, 

 and returning with a book, mounted the pulpit, and read a 

 flaring red-hot sermon of denunciatory character against 

 popery : " Then there was Hildebrand, or, more properly 

 speaking, Firebrand," etc., etc. — the whole read out in a 



