72 PRÆTERITA-I

and ingenious sermon, not tiresome to hear:¹-the prayers were abridged from the Church Service, and we, being the grandest people in the congregation, were allowed-though, as I now remember, not without offended and reproachful glances from the more conscientious worshippers-to come in when even those short prayers were half over. Mary and I used each to write an abstract of the sermon in the afternoon, to please ourselves,-Mary dutifully, and I to show how well I could do it.² We never went to church in afternoon or evening. I remember yet the amazed and appalling sensation, as of a vision preliminary to the Day of Judgment, of going, a year or two later, first into a church by candlelight.

80. We had no family worship, but our servants were better cared for than is often the case in ostentatiously religious houses. My mother used to take them, when girls, from families known to her, sister after sister, and we never had a bad one.³

On the Sunday evening my father would sometimes read us a sermon of Blair’s,⁴ or it might be, a clerk or a customer would dine with us, when the conversation, in mere necessary courtesy, would take generally the direction of sherry. Mary and I got through the evening how we could, over the Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan’s Holy War, Quarles’s Emblems, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Mrs. Sherwood’s

¹ [Hitherto misprinted “him,” but the MS. has “hear.” For another reference to these sermons, see St. Mark’s Rest, § 88 (Vol. XXIV. p. 277); and for the chapel, see below, p. 132. Burne-Jones, on reading these passages in Præterita- “that most heavenly book,” he called it-wrote saying that he too had worshipped in the same chapel. “How ineffably wonderful,” replied Ruskin, “that you and I both sate-and-behaved properly in Beresford Chapel!” Burne-Jones’s letter is accompanied by an amusing sketch of the “three-decker”: see Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. i. pp. 41-42. An oil-portrait of Dr. Andrews (died 1841) is in the Southwark Library, Walworth Road; a notice of him will be found in Basil Champneys’ Memoirs of Coventry Patmore, vol. i. pp. 126-128. His chapel in Beresford Street still stands.]

² [A page of his “Sermon Book” is shown on the opposite sheet of facsimiles; for his early map-drawing, see p. 74 (§ 82); the MS. of The Poetry of Architecture is ten years later.]

³ [One dynasty was that of the Stones; another was that of Lucy and Harriet Tovey: see below, ii. § 108 (p. 343).]

⁴ [Hugh Blair (1718-1800), of Edinburgh; his Sermons are in five volumes (1777-1801).]

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