Page:Distinguished Churchmen.djvu/81

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THE RIGHT REV. ALFRED BARRY, D.D.
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to King's College. And it seems to have been a very happy boyhood, if one may judge by the incidents which the Bishop himself has recorded in the page devoted to reminiscences of popular religious leaders in the Sunday Companion. In this record the Bishop, after recalling the tolling of the church bell in 1830, in token of the death of King George IV., as the earliest thing within his recollection, describes the rural condition then of many districts now among the most crowded in London and the suburbs. “Travelling was not easy,” he says. “Railways had hardly begun, and we children were taken to see the first out of London—the Greenwich railway—as one of the wonders of the world. London households had to be content in the summer with a change of air in the suburbs—at Blackheath, or Wandsworth, or Putney and the like—and even for this were very much dependent on the old-fashioned stage coaches or the omnibuses, which were just coming into vogue.”

A refreshing little touch of early nineteenth-century London life, surely. But what is more to the point in this work is Bishop Barry's happy sketch of the conditions of Church life at that time. The contrast with those of to-day is indeed marked. In the same account he describes the period intervening between 1826 and 1841 as “a rather dull, prosaic time, socially and politically,” and then goes on to say: “In respect of Church life, it was certainly a