therefore, even if they had not been at a revolutionary price, would be within the purchase of an ordinary vintner. "In country parish churches," says Mr. Denne the antiquary, "even where the district was small, there was often a choir of singers, for whom forms, desks, and books were provided; and they probably most of them had benefactors who supplied them with a pair of organs that might more properly have been termed a box of whistles. To the best of my recollection there were in the chapels of some of the colleges in Cambridge very, very indifferent instruments. That of the chapel belonging to our old house was removed before I was admitted." The use of the organ has occasioned a great commotion, if not a schism, among the Methodists of late. Yet our holy Herbert could call church music the "sweetest of sweets;" and describe himself when listening to it as disengaged from the body, and "rising and falling with its wings.' Harris, the chief builder of the Doncaster organ, was a contemporary and rival of Father Smith, famous among organists. Each built one for the Temple church, and Father Smith's had most votes in its favour. The peculiarity of the Doncaster organ, which was Harris's masterpiece, is, its having, in the great organ, two trumpets and a clarion, throughout the whole compass; and these stops are so excellent, that a celebrated musician said every pipe in them was worth its weight in silver. Our doctor dated from that year, in his own recollections, as the great era of his life. It served also for many of the Doncastrians, as a date to which they carried back their computations, till the generation which remembered the erecting of the organ was extinct. This was the age of church improvement in Doncastermeaning here by church, the material structure. Just thirty years before, the church had been beautified and the ceiling painted, too probably to the disfigurement of works of a better architectural age. In 1721, the old peal of five bells was replaced with eight new ones, of new metal, heretofore spoken of. In 1723 the church floor and churchyard, which had both been unlevelled by death's levelling course, were levelled anew, and new rails were placed to the altar. Two years later the corporation gave the new clock, and it was fixed to strike on the watch bell-that clock which numbered the hours of Daniel Dove's life from the age of seventeen till that of seventy. In 1736 the west gallery was put up, and in 1741, ten years after the organ, a new pulpit, but not in the old style; for pulpits, which are among the finest works of art in Brabant and Flanders, had degenerated in England, and in other Protestant countries. This probably was owing, in our own country, as much to 66 the prevalence of Puritanism, as to the general depravation of taste. It was for their beauty or their splendour that the early Quakers inveighed with such vehemence against pulpits, many of which places," saith George Keith in his quaking days, “as we see in England and many other countries, have a great deal of superfluity, and vain and superfluous labour and pains of carving, painting, and varnishing upon them, together with your cloth and velvet cushion in many places; because of which, and not for the height of them above the ground, we call them chief places. But as for a commodious place above the ground whereon to stand when one doth speak in an assembly, it was never condemned by our friends, who also have places whereupon to stand, when to minister, as they had under the law." In 1743 a marble communion table was placed in the church, and (passing forward more rapidly than the regular march of this narration, in order to present these ecclesiastical matters without interruption) a set of chimes were fixed in 1754-merry be the memory of those by whom this good work was effected! The north and south galleries were rebuilt in 1765; and in 1767 the church was whitewashed, a new reading desk put up, the pulpit removed to what was deemed a more convenient station, and Mrs. Neale gave a velvet embroidered cover and cushion for it-for which her name is enrolled among the benefactors of St. George's Church. That velvet which, when I remember it, had lost the bloom of its complexion, will hardly have been preserved till now even by the dier's renovating aid: and its embroidery has long since passed through the goldsmith's crucible. Sic transit excites a more melancholy feeling in me when a recollection like this arises in my mind, than even the "forlorn Hic jacet" of a neglected tombstone. Indeed such is the softening effect of time upon those who have not been rendered obdurate and insensible by the world and the world's law, that I do not now call to mind without some emotion even that pulpit, to which I certainly bore no good will in early life, when it was my fortune to hear from it so many somniferous discourses; and to bear away from it, upon pain of displeasure in those whose displeasure to me was painful, so many texts, chapter and verse, few or none of which had been improved to my advantage. "Public sermons" (hear! hear! for Martin Luther speaketh!)-" public sermons do very little edify children, who observe and learn but little thereby. It is more needful that they be taught and well instructed with diligence in schools; and at home that they be orderly heard and examined in what they have learned. This way profiteth much; it is, indeed, very wearisome, but it is very necessary." May I not then confess that no turn of expression however felicitous-no collocation of words however emphatic and beautiful-no other sentences whatsoever, although rounded, or pointed for effect with the most consummate skill, have ever given me so much delight, as those dear phrases which are employed in winding up a sermon, when it is brought to its long wished for close. It is not always, nor necessarily thus; nor ever would be so if these things were ordered as they might and ought to be. Hugh Latimer, Bishop Taylor, Robert South, John Wesley, Robert Hall, Bishop Jebb, Bishop Heber, Christopher Benson, your hearers felt no such tedium! when you reached that period it was to them like the cessation of a strain of music, which, while it lasted, had rendered them insensible to the lapse of time. "I would not," said Luther, "have preachers torment their hearers, and detain them with long and tedious preaching." CHAPTER XLVIÍ. P. I. DONCASTRIANA-GUY'S DEATH-SEARCH FOR HIS TOMBSTONE IN THE first years of Daniel's abode in Doncaster were distinguished by many events of local memorability. The old Friar's Bridge was taken down, and a new one with one large arch built in its stead. Turnpikes were erected on the roads to Saltsbrook and to Tadcaster; and in 1742 Lord Semple's regiment of Highlanders marched through the town, being the first soldiers without breeches who had ever been seen there since breeches were in use. In 1746, the Mansionhouse was begun, next door to Peter Hopkins's, and by no means to his comfort while the work was going on, nor indeed after it was completed, its effect upon his chimneys having heretofore been noticed. The building was interrupted by the rebellion. An army of six thousand English and Hessians was then encamped upon Wheatley Hills; and a Hessian general dying there, was buried in St. George's Church, from whence his leaden coffin was stolen by the gravedigger. Daniel had then completed his twenty-second year. Every summer he paid a month's visit to his parents; and those were happy days, not the less so to all parties because his second home had become almost as dear to him as his first. Guy did not live to see the progress of his pupil; he died a few months after the lad had been placed at Doncaster, and the delight of Daniel's first return was overclouded by this loss. It was a severe one to the elder Daniel, who lost in the schoolmaster his only intellectual companion. I have sought in vain for Richard Guy's tombstone in Ingleton churchyard. That there is one there can hardly, I think, be doubted; for if he left no relations who regarded him, nor perhaps effects enough of his own to defray this last posthumous and not necessary expense; and if Thomas Gent of York, who published the old poem of Flodden Field from his transcript, after his death, thought he required no other monument; Daniel was not likely to omit this last tribute of respect and affection to his friend. But the churchyard, which, when his mortal remains were deposited there, accorded well with its romantic site, on a little eminence above the roaring torrent, and with the then retired character of the village, and with the solemn use to which it was consecrated, is now a thickly peopled burial ground. Since their time manufactures have been established in Ingleton, and though eventually they proved unsuccessful, and were consequently abandoned, yet they continued long enough in work largely to increase the population of the churchyard. Amid so many tombs the stone which marked poor Guy's resting-place might escape even a more diligent search than mine. Nearly a century has elapsed since it was set up: in the course of that time its inscription not having been retouched, must have become illegible to all but an antiquary's poring and practised eyes; and perhaps to them also unless aided by his tracing tact, and by the conjectural supply of connecting words, syllables, or letters: indeed the stone itself has probably become half interred, as the earth around it has been disturbed and raised. Time corrodes our epitaphs, and buries our very tombstones. Returning pensively from my unsuccessful search in the churchyard to the little inn at Ingleton, I found there upon a sampler, worked in 1824 by Elizabeth Brown, aged 9, and framed as an ornament for the room which I occupied, some lines in as moral a strain of verse as any which I had that day perused among the tombs. And I transcribed them for preservation, thinking it not improbable that they had been originally composed by Richard Guy, for the use of his female scholars, and handed down for a like purpose, from one generation to another. This may be only a fond imagination, and perhaps it might not have occurred to me at another time; but many compositions have been ascribed in modern as well as ancient times, and indeed daily are so, to more celebrated persons, upon less likely grounds. These are the verses : "Jesus, permit thy gracious name to stand CHAPTER XLVIII. P. I. A FATHER'S MISGIVINGS CONCERNING HIS SON'S DESTINATION— PETER HOPKINS'S GENEROSITY-DANIEL IS SENT ABROAD TO GRADUATE IN MEDICINE. Heaven is the magazine wherein He puts QUARLES. THE elder Daniel saw in the marked improvement of his son at every yearly visit more and more cause to be satisfied with himself for having given him such a destination, and to thank Providence that the youth was placed with a master whose kindness and religious care of him might truly be called fatherly. There was but one consideration which sometimes interfered with that satisfaction, and brought with it a sense of uneasiness. The Doves from time immemorial had belonged to the soil as fixedly as the soil had belonged to them. Generation after generation they had moved in the same contracted sphere, their wants and wishes being circumscribed alike within their own few hereditary acres. Pride, under whatever form it may show itself, is of the devil; and though family pride may not be its most odious manifestation, even that child bears a sufficiently ugly likeness of its father. But family feeling is a very different thing, and may exist as strongly in humble as in high life. Naboth was as much attached to the vineyard, the inheritance of his fathers, as Ahab could be to the throne which had been the prize, and the reward, or punishment, of his father Omri's ambition. This feeling sometimes induced a doubt in Daniel whether affection for his son had not made him overlook his duty to his forefathers; whether the fixtures of the land are not VOL. L- -18 |