1761

WEAVERS AND PEERS.

3

patriotic counsels and self-sacrificing fate of Viscount Falkland, whose present representative was Governor of Bombay for a time. Two of the heroic Falkland's descendants, aged ladies, addressed a pathetic letter to Parliament about the time that the great missionary died, praying that they might not be doomed to starvation by being deprived of a Crown pension of £80 a year. The older branch of the Careys also had fallen on evil times, and it became extinct while the future missionary was yet four years old. The seventh lord was a weaver when he succeeded to the title, and he died childless. The eighth was a Dutchman who had to be naturalised, and he was the last. The Careys fell lower still. One of them bore to the brilliant and reckless Marquis of Halifax, Henry Carey who wrote one of the few English ballads that live. Another, the poet's granddaughter, was the mother of Edmund Kean, and he at first was known by her name on the stage.

At the time when the weaver became the lord the grandfather of the missionary was parish clerk and first schoolmaster of the village of Paulerspury, eleven miles south of Northampton, and near the ancient posting town of Towcester, on the old Roman road from London to Chester. The free school was at the east or "church end" of the village, which, after crossing the old Watling Street, straggles for a mile over a sluggish burn to the "Pury end." One son, Thomas, had enlisted and was in Canada. Edmund Carey, the second, set up the loom on which he wove the woollen cloth known as "tammy," in a two-storied cottage. There his eldest child, William, was born, and lived for six years till his father was appointed schoolmaster, when the family removed to the free schoolhouse. The cottage was demolished in 1854 by one Richard Linnell, who placed on the still meaner structure now occupying the site the memorial slab that guides many visitors to the spot. The school-house, in

which William Carey spent the eight most important years of his childhood till he was fourteen, and the school have more recently made way for the present pretty buildings.

The village surroundings and the county scenery coloured the whole of the boy's after life, and did much to make him the first agricultural improver and naturalist of Bengal, which he became. The lordship of Pirie, as it was called by Gitda, its Saxon owner, was given by the Conqueror, with much else, to his natural son, William Peverel, as we see from the Domesday survey. His descendants passed it on

to Robert de Paveli, whence its present name, but in Carey's time it was held by the second Earl of Bathurst, who was Lord Chancellor. Up to the very schoolhouse came the royal forest of Whittlebury, its walks leading north to the woods of Salcey, of Yardley Chase and Rockingham, from the beeches which give Buckingham its name. Carey must have often sat under the Queen's Oak, still venerable in its riven form, where Edward IV., when hunting, first saw Elizabeth, unhappy mother of the two princes murdered in the Tower. The silent robbery of the people's rights called "enclosures" has done much, before and since Carey's time, to sweep away or shut up the woodlands. The country may be less beautiful, while the population has grown so that Paulerspury has now

1761

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE AND ITS SHOEMAKERS.

5

nearly double the eight hundred inhabitants of a century ago. But its oolitic hills, gently swelling to above 700 feet, and the valleys of the many rivers which flow from this central watershed, west and east, are covered with fat vegetation almost equally divided between grass and corn and green crops. The many large estates are rich in gardens and orchards. The farmers, chiefly on small holdings, are famous for their shorthorns and Leicester sheep. Except for the rapidly developing production of iron from the Lias, begun by the Romans, there is but one manufacture, that of shoes. It is now centred by modern machinery and labour arrangements in Northampton itself, which has 24,000 shoemakers, and in the other towns, but a century ago the craft was common to every hamlet. For botany and agriculture, however, Northamptonshire was the finest county in England, and young Carey had trodden many a mile of it, as boy and man, before he left home for ever for Bengal.

Two unfinished autobiographical sketches, written from India at the request of Fuller and of Ryland, and letters of his youngest sister Mary, his favourite "Polly" who survived him, have preserved for us in still vivid characters the details of the early training of William Carey. He was the eldest of five children. He was the special care of their grandmother, a woman of a delicate nature and devout habits, who closed her sad widowhood in the weaver-son's cottage. Encompassed by such a living influence the grandson spent his first six years. Already the child unconsciously showed the eager thirst for knowledge, and perseverance in attaining his object, which made him chiefly what he became. His mother would often be awoke in the night by the pleasant lisping of a voice" casting accompts; so intent was he from childhood in the pursuit of knowledge. Whatever he began he finished; difficulties never seemed to discourage his mind." On removal to the ancestral schoolhouse the boy had a room to

himself. His sister describes it as full of insects stuck in

every corner that he might observe their progress. His many

He was

birds he entrusted to her care when he was from home. In this picture we see the exact foreshadowing of the man. Though I often used to kill his birds by kindness, yet when he saw my grief for it he always indulged me with the pleasure of serving them again; and often took me over the dirtiest roads to get at a plant or an insect. He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without observation on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of any kind he always observed it with care. Though I was but a child I well remember his pursuits. He always seemed in earnest in his recreations as well as in school. generally one of the most active in all the amusements and recreations that boys in general pursue. He was always beloved by the boys about his own age." To climb the highest tree was the object of their ambition; he fell often in the attempt, but did not rest till he had the nest he coveted. His uncle Peter was a gardener in the same village, and gave him his first lessons in botany and horticulture. He soon became responsible for his father's official garden, till it was the best kept in the neighbourhood. Wherever after that he lived, as boy or man, poor or in comfort, William Carey made and perfected his garden, and always for others, until he created at Serampore the botanical park which for more than half a century was unique in Southern Asia.

We have in a letter from the Manse, Paulerspury, a tradition of the impression made on the dull rustics by the dawning genius and loftier pursuits and character of the youth whom they but dimly comprehended. When fourteen or fifteen years of age he was most awkward and useless at any agricultural work. He had no desire to join with other boys in play and games. He went amongst them under the nickname of Columbus, and they would say, "Well, if you won't

1775

NATURALIST AND LOVER OF BOOKS.

play, preach us a sermon," which he would do. Mounting on an old dwarf witch-elm about 7 feet high (standing till recently), where several could sit, he would hold forth. This seems to have been a resort of his for reading, his favourite occupation. The parents said he seemed to be always awake at whatever time of the night they might speak to him. The same authority tells how, when suffering toothache, he allowed his companions to drag the tooth from his head with a violent jerk, by tying around it a string attached to a wheel used to grind malt, to which they gave a sharp turn.

The boy's own peculiar room was a little library as well as a museum of natural history. He possessed a few books, which indeed were many for those days, but he borrowed more from the whole country-side. Recalling the eight years of his intellectual apprenticeship till he was fourteen, from the serene height of his missionary standard, he wrote long after:—"I chose to read books of science, history, voyages, etc., more than any others. Novels and plays always disgusted me, and I avoided them as much as I did books of religion, and perhaps from the same motive. I was better pleased with romances, and this circumstance made me read the Pilgrim's Progress with eagerness, though to no purpose." The new era, of which he was to be the aggressive spiritual representative from Christendom, had not dawned. Walter Scott was ten years his junior. Captain Cook had not discovered the Sandwich Islands, and was only returning from the second of his three voyages while Carey was still at school. The church services and the watchfulness of his father supplied the directly moral training which his grandmother had begun.

The Paulerspury living of St. James is a valuable rectory in the gift of New College, Oxford. Originally built in Early English, and rebuilt in 1844, the church must have presented a still more venerable appearance a century ago than