The Victorian parson's interests included but were not limited to philology, anthropology, folklore, children's stories, hymnology, hagiography, geology, topography, painting, optics, metallurgy, ancient and modern history, musical theory, biblical archeology, the plausibility of miracles, the minutiae of the English salt mining industry, and the theater. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything. It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson's dutifully compiled Life and Letters.
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