William Pitt Scargill

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Extract: CHAPTER X. "Les vrais ev nements de la Vie sont quelquefois, beaucoup plus incroyable que ceux que l'Imagination presente l'Esprit." L'Abbe Prev t. There are some whose lot it is to pace the dull and beaten round of daily life like a sort of moral turn-spit, unconscious of the stages by which they travel from the cradle to the tomb. To these the extraordinary accidents and romantic coincidences, which occasionally chequer and diversify the flat road of human existence in the history of other men, appear incredible as the Arabian Nights' Entertainment; yet Fiction, in her most fantastic mood, does not leave the common average of events farther behind than reality is continually doing. Zorilda's was no common fate, and it pursued her to the grave. Rachel's schemes had prospered so entirely that, by the time that she and her young mistress reached the great northern line, no farther anxiety attended their progress, and they journied onwards without apprehension. They stopped in the first large town, and found no difficulty in procuring pecuniary supplies at the Bank..... SCARGILL, WILLIAM PITT (1787-1836), unitarian minister and author, was born in London in 1787. Originally intended for a business life, he attracted the notice of Hugh Worthington, minister at Salters' Hall, under whose advice he studied for the ministry at Wymondley academy. For six months (March to August 1811) he was assistant to James Tayler at High Pavement Chapel, Nottingham. In 1812 he succeeded Thomas Madge as minister of Churchgate Street Chapel, Bury St. Edmunds, and held this charge for twenty years. His ministry was not successful, and he turned to literature as a means of augmenting a narrow income, contributing to periodicals, and producing original tales and sketches. He had been a liberal in politics, but displeased his congregation by becoming a writer for the tory press. Resigning his charge in 1832, he became an adherent of the established church. At the end of 1834 he published anonymously 'The Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister, ' in which he plays the part of a candid friend to his former co-religionists. The book is often classed with the anonymous 'Particulars of the Life of a Dissenting Minister' 1813], by Charles Lloyd; but Lloyd's is a genuine autobiography, Scargill's a romance, though possibly based on his early life and education. He made a precarious living by his pen, yet his sketches are brisk and readable, with a curious vein of paradox. An essay on 'The Blessings of Biography' opens with the advice, 'If you think a man to be a devil, and want to make him an angel, sit down to write a biography of him.' He was famed as a punster. He died of brain fever at Bury St. Edmunds on 24 Jan. 1836. He married Mary Anne, daughter of Robert Cutting of Chevington, Suffolk, who survived him with two children.

ADVERTISEMENT. The following story is founded on facts which came within the knowledge of the writer. The precise point at which truth ends, and fiction begins, it is not necessary to divulge; but in an age when an avidity for the stimulus of real adventure seems in a great degree to have superseded the love of mere romance, it may not be uninteresting to state that the heroine of the following pages is not altogether a creature of imagination. CHAPTER I. "Oh this is trim "-Troilus and Cressida. At not more than a stone's throw from a neat market town, in a certain shire of England, lived Francis Hartland, Esq. in a well-built square house, which was separated from the King's high road, by a lawn of twenty acres. Round this lawn a double row of handsome elms lined a ring fence, and formed the outer boundary, in that part next the house, of a bank covered with all sorts of shrubs, which sloped in a gradually inclined plane, from the shining laurel to the dwarf cistus, and met a broad belt of gravel, hard and smooth as marble, through which no upstart weed ever dared to force its way. This walk was fringed by a border of flowers, in such variety of glowing tints, that lawn and all might be aptly compared to a robe of green velvet, trimmed with a phylactery of broidered work, worthy of Sheba's Queen in all her glory, while the whole exhibited such precision and nicety in the keeping, as to suggest the idea that its owner, in league with the fairies, possessed some secret charm against every noxious reptile and devouring fly. This Snuggery was not the hereditary right of Mr. Hartland, but was purchased for valuable consideration, and he came to live in it, nobody knew from whence, or how incited.......