rectly there must be quadruple this number of persons employed, the merest pauper among the population has hundreds of invisible hands held out to provide him the necessaries and comforts of life. The smooth working of this great distributive machine is due to the principle of competition-that spring which so nicely adjusts all the varying conditions of life, and which, in serving itself, does the best possible service to the community at large, and accomplishes more than the cleverest system of centralization which any individual mind could devise.

ART. II.-1. The Bell: its Origin, History, and Uses. By the Rev. Alfred Gatty. London. 1848.

2. Paper on Bells, with Illustrations. By the Rev. H. T. Ellacombe, in Report of Bristol Architectural Society, 1850. THERE is abundance of literary evidence to show that in by

gone times the history and office of the bell engaged the attention of the learned. Mr. Ellacombe enumerates nearly forty distinct treatises of foreign origin, ranging from 1495 to the present century. Of these the best known is the work of Magius De Tintinnabulis.' The author, an Italian, was a civil judge in the Venetian service at Candia, when besieged in 1571 by the Turks. He was taken prisoner, and amused his captivity by writing the treatise which has preserved his name. His occupation could gain him no favour in a land where the bell was considered the symbol of sinful infidelity, and he was finally beheaded by order of a pasha. The productions of our native pens are mostly confined to the art of ringing, which is peculiarly an English accomplishment. In other countries there is no attempt at a musical peal, and the only object is to produce the utmost possible noise by a chance, irregular clanging. Such was formerly among ourselves the enthusiasm of the educated classes on the subject, that, in the reign of Queen Mary, Dr. Tresham thought there was no surer method of enticing the students at Oxford to mass than by promising to make the University peal the finest in England. The revived interest in all ecclesiastical studies has extended itself to bells; and the instructive work of Mr. Gatty and the researches of Mr. Ellacombe are worthy fruits of this newly-awakened spirit.

We are accustomed, to use the expression of Mr. Gatty,' to hear the bell speak for itself.' From youth to age the sound is sent forth through crowded streets or floats with sweetest melody above the quiet fields. It gives a tongue to time, which would

otherwise

otherwise pass over our heads as silently as the clouds, and lends a warning to its perpetual flight. It is the voice of rejoicing at festivals, at christenings, at marriages, and of mourning at the departure of the soul. From every church-tower it summons the faithful of distant valleys to the house of God; and when life is ended they sleep within the bell's deep sound. Its tone, therefore, comes to be fraught with memorial associations, and we know what a throng of mental images of the past can be aroused by the music of a peal of bells:

'O, what a preacher is the time-worn tower,
Reading great sermons with its iron tongue!'

The bell has had a continuous existence amongst civilised people from a very early time. For nearly fourteen centuries it has been employed by the Church, and it was known to ancient nations for perhaps as many centuries before our era. Consecrated to christian purposes, its sound has travelled with the light that has lighted the Gentiles; and, now that the Gospel has penetrated to the most distant regions of the globe, there is not perhaps a minute of time in which the melody of bells is not somewhere rising towards Heaven, as—

'Earth with her thousand voices praises God.'

For ages before the bell from its airy height in the old churchtower announced its cognizance of human events, diminutive bells were in common use. An eastern patriarch in the twelfth century quotes a writer who gravely avers that Tubal Cain, the artificer in brass and iron, formed the sounding metal into a rude kind of bell, and that Noah employed it to summon his shipcarpenters to their work. Less theoretical historians may be well contented to begin with the golden bells mentioned in the Book of Exodus as attached to the vestment of the high priest in the Sanctuary, in the same way that they were appended to the royal costume amongst the ancient Persians; or with those small bronze bells, apparently intended for horse and chariot furniture, of which a great number were found by Mr. Layard in a chamber of the palace of Nimroud. On being analysed, the curious fact was discovered that they contain one part of tin to ten parts of copper; and if, as Mr. Layard remarks, the tin was obtained, as probably was the case, from Phoenicia, it may actually have been exported nearly three thousand years ago from the British isles.

Amongst the Greeks hand-bells were employed in camps and garrisons, were hung on triumphal cars, sounded in the fishmarket of Athens, summoned guests to feasts, preceded funeral processions, and were sometimes used in religious rites in the

temples.

temples. Another purpose to which they were put was to hang them about the necks of malefactors on their way to execution, 'lest,' says Zonaras, innocent persons should be defiled by touching them.' It is more likely that it was to draw the gaze of the people upon the criminal, and thus aggravate his punishment. From this Greek custom was derived (we are told) the Roman one of fixing a bell and a scourge to the emperor's chariot, that in the height of his power he might be admonished against pride, and be mindful of human misery.

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It is needless to recapitulate all the less doubtful applications of bells among the Romans. The hour of bathing and of business at public places was announced by it, and with the imperfect means possessed by the ancients of measuring time, it must have been a far more important signal than at present. The wealthier Romans had them in domestic use to assemble their families, 'just,' says Magius, writing about 1570, as the household of nobles and cardinals at Rome are summoned to dinner and supper by a bell hung in the highest part of the building, so that it may not only be heard by the inmates, but by those who are without.' Something larger than the hand-bell would appear to have been common about the same period in English mansions, to judge from the expression in Macbeth—

Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,

She strike upon the bell.'

But in the reign of Elizabeth the horn still hung outside the gate, and did much of the duty which afterwards devolved upon bells. In the court at Penshurst there is a bell of considerable size, suspended from a wooden frame, with the inscription, Robert, Earl of Leicester, at Penshurst, 1649.' The horn had by this time been quite superseded. The disuse of the handbell was one of the many visible signs of the downfall of the old aristocratic system-an indication that the troop of servants had ceased to be in waiting.' Few persons are aware how modern is the present practice of domestic bell-hanging; for no trace of it has been discovered in the old mansions of our nobility, even so late as the reign of Queen Anne. A correspondent of the 'Builder' states that when he was taken over Belton Hall by Lord Brownlow, about forty years ago, his lordship pointed out two large bells, one suspended over the landing on the stairs at the north end of the hall and the other at the south end, remarking that they were the only means his predecessors had of commanding the services of the domestics; but as it is getting into fashion,' he added, to have bells hung from the rooms in houses, I must have them also.' The late Duke was

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the

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the first Northumberland who allowed the walls of Alnwick to be pierced. Each room had its lackey instead of its bell. The palatial mansion of Holkham, which was commenced in 1734 and completed in 1760, had no such conveniences till the present Earl provided them a few years ago. So many centuries did it take to conduct mankind to the simple invention of ringing a bell in a horizontal direction by means of a crank and a piece of wire. But we have not yet emerged from ancient Rome, where, amongst other fancies, bells were appended to horses, a custom which lingers in many parts of the continent, and which was almost universal, until recent days, with our English teams. On dark nights in narrow lanes they answered the important end of warning horsemen or waggoners of each other's approach, and enabling them to avoid a collision in a spot where there was not room enough to pass. The improvement in roads has put an end to the practice. The Romans belled' their flocks as well as their horses, in order, according to Strabo, that wild beasts might be scared away by the sound. If any one,' it is enacted in the rural laws of Justinian, take away the bell from an ox or sheep, let him, being convicted, be scourged as a thief, and, if the animal be lost thereby, let him pay the loss.' Magius relates that the shepherds of his day continued the custom, but not so much to keep off beasts of prey as to enable the owners to trace their cattle when they strayed,' which is its chief modern use, and every flock in Scotland has one such indicator to enable the herdsman to find the whereabouts of his animals when lost in the snow. Besides,' adds Magius, the shepherds think that the flocks are pleased with the sound of the bell, as they are by the flute, and that they grow fat in consequence.' The notion that animals have some sort of conscious pride in these appendages is countenanced by Southey, who, speaking of the Alpine cattle in his youth, says, that they stalk forth proud and pleased when wearing their bells. If the leading cow, who hitherto bore the largest bell, be deprived of it, she manifests a sense of disgrace by lowing incessantly, abstaining from food, and growing lean; and the happy rival on which the bell has been conferred is singled out for her vengeance.'

The material of the bells so long known to heathen antiquity was generally bronze, sometimes silver, and not uncommonly gold. Their first construction in the expanded form with which we are familiar now was due to christians. When the true God was worshipped in lonely caverns, amid the haunts of the wolf, or under the ban of heathens more cruel than the beasts, no sounds proclaimed their whereabouts to their foes; but from the time when praise and incense rose in stately temples, enriched with all the accessories

that

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that devotion could contrive, the bell assumed its part in the solemnities of religion. Some authors have ascribed its introduction (A.D. 400) to Paulinus Bishop of Nola, in Campania, the contemporary of St. Jerome; but the silence of the bishop with regard to either tower or bells, in an epistle in which he minutely describes his church, is, as Mr. Gatty remarks, a strong argument against the claim, especially as there is no allusion to the subject in any contemporary or immediately subsequent writer. It was not till after A.D. 500, according to Hospinianus, that bells, which he calls campane, came into ecclesiastical use. They are supposed to have received their designation from the place where they were originally made. Because,' says Magius, the founders practised this most useful work in Campania, the large bells were called campanæ ;'* and hence the term campanile was given to the towers in which they were hung. A species of diminutive bells were in like manner called nola, from Nola, the city, and these were sometimes attached to a frame and rung during service. The wandering ecclesiastics would naturally bring over specimens of the nolæ from abroad shortly after their primitive application in Italy to sacred purposes, and the portable altar bells seem accordingly to have been the first which were known in England. But the ponderous, far-sounding bell was introduced by the Anglo-Saxons at an early period. It was among the enrichments for his church which Benedick, abbot of Weremouth and Jarrow, brought from Italy in the reign of king Egfrid; and about the same period (A.D. 680) the nuns of St. Hilda's sisterhood, as Bede relates, were summoned by it to prayers. It has been conjectured by several antiquaries that the tower of the church was suggested by the bell, that being lifted up aloft it might throw its solemn tones to a greater distance.

For many centuries the bell-foundries appear to have been set up in the religious houses of Europe, and the abbots, priors, and frequently the bishops were the master-manufacturers. As long as the casting took place in the monasteries a religious character was given to the process. The brethren stood ranged round the furnaces; the 150th Psalm was chanted, and the Almighty was invoked to overshadow the molten metal with his power and bless the work for the honour of the saint to whom it was to be dedicated.t

A Roman gentleman of the present day, well known as an Etrurian collector, claims the title of Marchese Campana in right of an ancestor set up against Bishop Paulinus as inventor of bells, and the title has, we believe, been sanctioned either by Pius IX., or the King of Naples, or both.

†The grand Ode of Schiller on the Casting of the Bell' is now so familiar to all the world, that we need do no more than recommend those who are ignorant of German to read it in the translation of Sir E. B. Lytton.

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