III.
A Peasant Preacher.
(Golden Hours, 1873.)
WILLIAM HUNTINGTON.
Few men have been more abused or misrepresented than William Huntington. Crabbe openly satirizes the Peasant Preacher in his "Borough;" but his style of painting was too conscientious to misrepresent very considerably. It is Southey and Macaulay, however, who have given currency to the true notion of his character usually entertained. It consists in what Carlyle calls "The fanatic-hypocrite theory." Fanaticism is so vague a charge, so entirely dependent for its meaning on the maker of it, that I leave it to the facts of Huntington's life to show how far it is true or false. But as to hypocrisy, no one with the slightest sympathy for the struggles of the human soul, unless he is already prejudiced, can read Huntington's remarkable autobiographies and believe him a hypocrite. John Sterling, the friend of Maurice, of Carlyle, and of Julius Hare, thus writes to the latter concerning him:—
"I read last night a small volume by W. Huntington, S.S., called 'Heaven taken by Prayer.' Seldom have I been more astonished, all my impressions of him having been derived from a dimly remembered and most scurrilous and coxcombical article (unless I do it great injustice) of Southey's in the Quarterly Review, and from an anecdote quoted out of Matthews the comedian's life, which on such an authority I do not credit. This little book shows him as the worthy compeer of Bunyan, and there is hardl
