Excerpt from Shelburne Essays Some thirty years ago, in 1875 to be exact, that unstable compound, the English Church, was shocked by the news that a Cornish cler gyman, dying away from home, had received the sacraments from the hands of a Roman priest. Over the head of his young wife, who had summoned the.ministrant to his bedside, there was poured a bitter stream of controversy, as was the wont of the Establishment in those days; and the storm was not allayed by the pub lication a few months later Of a somewhat irre sponsible biography of the apostate by the Rev. S. Baring-gould. It was then seen that this death bed conversion was only the last act of a life crammed with eccentricities, and from that day to this the Vicar of Morwenstow has enjoyed a kind of pre-eminence in curiosity. At last his son-in law, Mr. C. E. Byles, has collected his scattered prose and verse in two attractive volumes, and has added to these a full and accurate record ofa. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.