It was soon quite clear to me that if I was to live in peace I must take to myself a wife. The squire and the surveyor had daughters. The squire’s would each have a hundred a-year apiece, a welcome addition to my small income. They were good-looking, and by repute were virtuous and easy of temper, but when I became acquainted with them I found that I must not expect from them any entertainment save the description of visits to the milliner, or schemes for parties, or the gossip of the country-side. I did not demand, _Mr. Rambler_, the critical acumen of Mrs. Montagu, or the erudition of Mrs. Carter, but I believe you will agree with me that a wife, and especially the wife of a clergyman and a scholar, should be able to read a page of Dr. Barrow’s sermons without yawning, and should not drop Mr. Pope’s _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_ in five minutes unless she happened to light upon some particularly exciting adventure. I therefore dismissed the thought of these young ladies, and the daughters of the surveyor were for the same reasons ineligible, with the added objection that if I chose one of them the squire and his family would never enter the church again.
One day I went over to B. to leave my watch for repairs. I noticed a fishing-rod in the shop, and as I was fond of the sport I asked the watchmaker if it was his. He said that he generally went fishing when he could spare himself a holiday, and that he had just spent two days on the Avon. I was thinking of the Stratford river and foolishly inquired which Avon, forgetting the one near us.
‘Our Avon,’ he replied; ‘our Avon, of course, sir; _the_ Avon.
‘“Proud of his adamants with which he shines And glisters wide, as als of wondrous Bath.”’
I did not recollect the lines, but discovered on inquiry that they were Spenser’s, an author, I regret to say, whom I had not read. I was astonished that a person with a mechanical occupation who sat in a window from morning to night dissecting time-pieces should be acquainted with poetry, and I begged him to tell me something of his life. He was the son of a bookseller in Bristol who had been apprenticed to the celebrated Mr. Bernard Lintot. The father failed in business, and soon afterwards died leaving a widow and six children. My friend was then about fourteen years old. He had been well educated, but his mother was compelled to accept the offer of a neighbour who took compassion on her, and he was brought up to the watchmaking trade in Bath. He had to work long hours and endure many hardships which it might be supposed would tend to repress the sallies of the most lively imagination, but some men are so constituted that adverse circumstances do but stimulate a search for compensation. So it was with him. In his leisure hours he studied not only horological science but the works of our great English authors.