Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/372

 J. H. Newman.

Ordination.

Buries an unbaptized child.

Wins the hearts of the gipsies.

and indefensible insult against John Henry Newman in the libellous pamphlet 'What then does Dr. Newman Mean?' It must have been a bitter memory and humiliation to Charles Kingsley, while life remained, to feel the scathing brand of Newman's scorn. In the later editions of the 'Apologia pro Vita Sua,' Newman generously cancelled and omitted all the personalities of his rejoinder to Kingsley, his unpardoned and unpardonable assailant. They had won their triumphant success, and needed no recall or repetition. The 'Apologia,' cleansed and immaculate, survives as a literary triumph, and theological landmark, and will do so for ages."

In 1864 Ebsworth took his degree of B.A., and on the 31st of July was ordained at Bishopthorpe by his dear friend Dr. William Thomson, Archbishop of York, and on the 1st of August he became curate of Market Weighton. He often recalled with affection his college days, and considered that he could " see a purer theological course of study than what attends the clergy now. We have plenty of noisy ostentation and polemical bitterness, but we seem to be ever receding from the single-minded aim that used to lead us onward to the light. I have been no bigot in my time, no willing squabbler over differences in creeds. From my earliest childhood I found myself nurtured in what was taught me by the excellent Bishop Terrot, in our Episcopal Church of Scotland, at Edinburgh, where we were esteemed Dissenters, but grew in faith and quiet useful practice of piety and self-help and unity, without warring against dissentient sects or straying into doubts and extravagances. Episcopalians, yes, but modestly and sincerely Christians, apart, but not arrogant."

Ebsworth's intercourse with the vicar was not cordial, and on the latter's refusal to bury the baby of a sailor's wife because it had not been baptized, Ebsworth went to the house of the poor woman, read the Burial Service over the open coffin, strewing flowers in it, and attended the funeral the same night.

While at Market Weighton he won the hearts of the wandering gipsies by explaining to them in groups the coloured pictures of Dick Turpin's ride, which had been posted on the railway bridges to announce a coming circus troup. Ebsworth would tell them all the story of Harrison Ainsworth's 'Rookwood,' and would show how true were Dick's friends the gipsies, who helped to disguise him when he had ridden Black Bess to death at the outskirts of York. Especially would the gipsies gaze curiously at the pictures of Dick's warning, the suspended malefactor in chains on a moorland gibbet. With highwaymen, " as with poachers and smugglers and other born vagabonds, I have the native affinity. My long pedestrianism in Bohemia, Moravia, and other out-of-the-way places in the heart of Europe, my acquisition of the Tohek language and much of the Romany lingo, gathered from Borrow and others,