A Popish blacksmith had produced a strong Protestant reaction by declaring that, as soon as the Emancipation Bill was passed, he should do a great stroke of business in gridirons; and the disinclination of the Shepperton parishioners generally to dim the unique glory of St Lawrence, rendered the Church and Constitution an affair of their business and bosoms.

A zealous Evangelical preacher had made the old sounding-board vibrate with quite a different sort of elocution from Mr.Gilfil's; the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New Versions; and the great square pews were crowded with new faces from distant corners of the parish--perhaps from Dissenting chapels.
You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of Shepperton.

He was no such thing.

Those were days when a man could hold three small livings, starve a curate a-piece on two of them, and live badly himself on the third.

It was so with the Vicar of Shepperton; a vicar given to bricks and mortar, and thereby running into debt far away in a northern county--who executed his vicarial functions towards Shepperton by pocketing the sum of thirty-five pounds ten per annum, the net surplus remaining to him from the proceeds of that living, after the disbursement of eighty pounds as the annual stipend of his curate.