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Updated: June 2, 2025
As usual he did not know it, but he had entered none the less upon another reaction. Towneley had just taken Ernest's threepenny-bit into his hands, looked at it and returned it to him as a bad one. Why did he see in a moment that it was a bad one now, though he had been unable to see it when he had taken it from Pryer?
There was something almost sublime in the misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues. Other houses of less wealth and more modern date had their pedigrees in the history of Lancashire.
My grandfather, Gilbert Hamerton, possessed an old gabled mansion with a small but picturesque estate, divided from Towneley Park by a public road, and he had other property in the town and elsewhere enough to make him independent, but not enough to make him one of the great squires.
Much as Ernest liked him he found himself shrinking from speaking to him, and was endeavouring to pass him without doing so when Towneley saw him and stopped him at once, being pleased to see an old Cambridge face.
The romantic possibilities of peasant life were to some extent reflected in the ballads; it is the burlesque aspect that is preserved to us in the 'shepherd' plays of the mystery cycles. We possess the plays on the adoration of the shepherds belonging to the four extant series, a duplicate in the Towneley plays, and one odd specimen, making six in all.
The rustic element varies in each case, but it assumed the form of burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic 'Coventry' cycle of the Cotton manuscript. Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays.
Towneley, as I have said, knew that Ernest would have money soon, but Ernest did not of course know that he knew it. Towneley was rich himself, and was married now; Ernest would be rich soon, had bona fide intended to be married already, and would doubtless marry a lawful wife later on.
The scratch fours being ended the connection between the two came to an end, but Towneley never passed Ernest thenceforward without a nod and a few good-natured words. In an evil moment he had mentioned Towneley's name at Battersby, and now what was the result? Here was his mother plaguing him to ask Towneley to come down to Battersby and marry Charlotte.
Suppose she had invested in the full confidence of a recommendation by some eminent London banker whose advice was bad, and so had lost all her money, and suppose she had done this with a light heart and with no conviction of sin would her innocence of evil purpose and the excellence of her motive have stood her in any stead? Not they. But to return to my story. Towneley gave my hero most trouble.
But to make Towneleys possible there must be hewers of wood and drawers of water men in fact through whom conscious knowledge must pass before it can reach those who can apply it gracefully and instinctively as the Towneleys can. I am a hewer of wood, but if I accept the position frankly and do not set up to be a Towneley, it does not matter."
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