The Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. What duller looking volume than a Parish Register ? What drier commentary on the trite text, Mors omnibus communis ? What is it, but a barren abstract of the annals of mortality? Where to be born, and die, Of rich and poor makes all the history ? It might, indeed, set on a calculator, or a life-insurance broker, to compute the comparative duration of life in different periods; a Shandean philosopher to speculate on the successive fashions in Christian names; a manuscript-hunter to note down the revolutions of penmanship; or a moral economist to infer the progress of corruption from the increase of illegitimate births: but to men whose thoughts and feelings travel in the high-way of the world, its all-levelling uniformity presents neither amusement nor instruction. But suppose an aged man to open this same volume, and, seated in the midst of a circle of his fellow-parishioners, run his eye along the time-discoloured pages, and relate his recollections, and his father's, and his great-great-grandfather's recollections of every name in the list, though perhaps few had done more than erect a new dial, or leave the interest of 6 to be distributed on New-Year's-Day to twenty poor widows; yet his talk would not be devoid of interest to such as find a tale in every thing, and that all of whom he spake had been born within hearing of the same church clock, would infuse a family-feeling into his narratives?He would be a local biographer. If a few leading characters be excepted, who often owe their exception more to fortune and circumstance than to their intrinsic power, the notices of men in general histories are very much like the Parish Begister: ?consisting of names and dates, and events in which the bulk of the species are as passive as in t...