Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/228



IFTY years ago, when the burning of a bishop at Smithfield would scarce have created more sensation in clerical circles than a Ritualistic Commission or a Pan-Anglican Synod, our divines took their share of secular pastime far more freely than at present. It was the parson who killed his thirty brace of partridges, and this, too, with a flint-and-steel gun, over dogs of his own breaking, on the broiling 1st of September. It was the parson who alone got to the end of that