I

AM sorry to say it; but true it is that living in hotels one gets a bad view of human nature; I mean in the matter of petty selfishness. Plainly, many human beings go upon the principle expressed by that great and good man George the Fourth, It will last my time. In many little ways one is made to see this.

I have come away, in this sunshiny October weather, for a little turn among Cathedral churches: a little turn, which must be the last. Never more in England can the writer visit any such church for the first time: all are well-known now. Clearly, in the mind's eye, can he call up every one; accurately indeed, but somewhat paler and less substantial than the fact. For the remembrances of things are ghostly. No more, after this last time, shall I discourse of Gothic church-architecture. Already, even the most long-suffering friends appear somewhat wearied of that topic. ready I am rather ashamed of a too accurate recollection of the measurements of length and height; and driven to pretend not to exactly know facts which are known to me with entire exactness. There is a certain pudency about a strongly-felt liking specially one whose origin cannot be explained. And I live in a country in which various good people are of opinion that one might find something better to recollect.

Al

Let us sit down here on a large stone. How silent it is!

It is the twelfth day of October. The sun is going down, a great red ball. The trees around (and there are many trees) are rich as ever. The leaves are thick, and green in the main; but a little touched with autumn purple, yellow, and gold. This is a quiet lane, running through an undulating landscape; a little

way below flows a river, never seen till yesterday, though its name has long been familiar in 'Hart-Leap Well., It is the Ure: I crossed it by a bridge of seventeen arches. The arches are small, or they would not have so counted up. A mile off, towards the west, there is a solemn grey mass; a great building, with three low square towers :-Ripon Cathedral. I have left it to very near the end of my Cathedral explorations, not expecting much of it; but it is a noble church, worth going far to see. And this autumn stillness and this smoky light (though there is no smoke) suit this distant view of it. It impresses the writer as few things can impress him. People who live among these things may get accustomed to them, and not mind them much. But there is no such fortune for me.

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Coming by railway from the north, you turn off from the track at Thirsk, between Darlington and York. Just a quarter of an hour of rapid steam travel, and here is Ripon station: of red brick, and not unbefitting the cathedral city. Drive up-hill into the town; and in the market-place, an ancient square with a lofty shaft in the middle, you may find the Unicorn,' a quaint comfortable oldfashioned inn. Leaving it, turn to the left, walk on; and in a few minutes you come full on that western front, familiar to all students of Mr. King's admirable Handbook to the Northern Cathedrals. There are the low square towers, low by comparison, for the gable between is nearly as high-a little more than a hundred feet. In old days, each of these three towers carried a spire of wood, leaded, which added more than another hundred feet to their height. Let us enter straightway : always see the interior of a cathe

dral first. Broad, light nave, timber-roofed; respectable transept; beautiful choir, with grand eastern window filled with middling stained glass, with rich tabernacle-work over the stalls, as rich as anywhere in England, with groined roof of wood, with glazed triforium, with no episcopal throne beyond a comfortable seat at the end of the stalls next the altar. Once there was a crypt, lined with human bones; but these have of late been decorously buried. There is a singular little maze of a dark crypt, under the central tower, where is a narrow hole in a wall, called 'St. Wilfrid's Needle.' To this day, as in former days, many women suffer themselves to be pulled through the needle. Their safe passage is assurance of moral purity; likewise of speedy marriage. A camel could not pass through the eye of that needle; but there is room for almost any human being to pass with sufficient

ease.

The Cathedral does not stand in a close. There is a churchyard on the south side, and a public road, in which is the deanery, skirts it on the north. The way descends, as you reach the east end of the church, and you look up, by-and-by, on a pretty swell of green grass, with fine trees, crowned by the Minster towers. Hard by runs Ripon's other river, the Skell; and pervading the streets in this quarter of the little town, you have many pleasant views of the ancient sanctuary.

Let such as visit Ripon give all the light of an October day to the magnificent ruin of Fountains Abbey. Through rich green fields, at two miles' distance you reach the fair domain of Studley Royal, whose noble owner throws it open to all comers every day but Sunday. There, the Skell running by its walls, and actually through some part of the buildings, stands what is probably the noblest and completest monastic ruin in England.

Noble church, near 400 feet long, almost entire save the roof; great tower; glorious cloister; all the belongings of a great religious house. How calm a retreat in the stormy Middle Ages! But no doubt there were fiery, ambitious hearts, chafing here; and people who were sick of the whole thing, and would willingly go forth into the wild outer world.

When you are satiated with Ripon and Fountains, then by railway past Harrogate to busy Leeds. There is time to-day to do no more than hasten through crowded streets, and see the outside of the parish church. I found an outer door open, and penetrated into a vestry, where a very churlish person was turning over some music. A little door beyond him entered the church; and half-a-minute would have sufficed for him to open it and afford a glimpse of the interior. But the churlish person, in answer to a civil request, stated that it was not his business to show the church; and then went on turning over his music. On being asked whether he was forbidden to show the church, he sulkily replied Yes. Of course there was nothing to do but to retreat. If the statement was true, which I am bound to believe, the authorities of the Parish Church of Leeds may be esteemed as what some people call 'a caution.'

The station is regained, and the train departs. It journeys through smoky tracts, and by ugly townsDewsbury, Huddersfield, Staleybridge. It is curious to discern the traces of manufacturing industry and a crowded population in a wild mountainous and moorland region. You pass through that long tunnel under Blackstone Edge, the backbone dividing Lancashire from Yorkshire. Here, at last, is Stockport: further on is Crewe; and as the night darkens down, through a maze of flame and smoke, the famous Black Country, diving

at last into a tunnel of short extent, we enter a huge station, with a roof of vast space and height, but somehow in all respects looking very dirty and squalid. This is great Birmingham. The Queen's Hotel, which forms part of the station buildings, shall be our base of operations for several coming days. It is exciting, for one who lives in a very quiet place, to stand on a footbridge that crosses the rails from side to side, and survey the ceaseless bustle of arriving and departing trains. Never surely did engines screech so awfully. Pleasant it is to diligently examine the bookstalls, and discover what form of literature is the most popular for the railway traveller of the time. These enjoy ments are simple, and they cost little some people, no doubt, would esteem them slow.

But with the next morning Birmingham is left behind; and in an hour and a quarter, speeding past Bromsgrove and Droitwich, we have reached the outskirts of a considerable town. Passing out from the railway, at a mile's distance, away to the left, we discover a great square tower. First, through a somewhat squalid suburb, then through streets in no way remarkable, let us push on in that direction; till we come upon the length of a great church, with a double transept, standing in a pleasant enclosure of old-fashioned dwellings, on ground that falls away to a river. The river is the Severn. This is Worcester Cathedral.

A great work of restoration has been going on here, for several years past. The exterior of the church has been made fresh and new-like: the Venerable is not here. Entering, you will find the west end of the nave plainly arranged for worship: the choir is in the workmen's hands, and must remain in them for another year. There is a specially beautiful reredos. The chapter-house, a decagon with a central shaft, is

fine: and the cloisters are all they should be. The Guesten Hall is in ruins. An ancient hall, above ore side of the cloisters, used as a school, has a fine open roof. It is here, in the north alley of the cloisters, that you may read the proverbial Miserrimus over a grave. But it seems as though Wordsworth understood the word too gravely: the reference was to the reduced worldly estate of a worthy nonjuror. In the choir before the altar rests the dust of King John-nobody much caring. There is no pleasanter deanery. And on the south side of the church are many fine trees.

Let us pervade the sacred precincts, and enjoy them in quietness. The simple pleasure may be permitted to the unaccustomed Scot. Such things are not, north of the Tweed: would they were! And the tide seems setting towards their diminution south of the Tweed

It is sorrowful: but what must be, must. One cannot help sometimes thinking, as one reads history, and reasons on what history tells of the mutations which existing institutions have passed through, that many political, and ecclesiastical, and social changes, may be coming; and that people who love the dear old ways will have their painful trials, if they live long enough. But the life of the individual is short, and the life of the community is long; and it is well, to save many a heart-ache, that it should be so. Let us quietly slip away, before some things come that seem coming!

We must be gone at last, and unwillingly turn our back upon this pleasant place. Through the city, in no way specially attractive, we gain the railway again; and, in the gathering shadows of Saturday evening, are once more in our bustling but lonely home amid Birmingham smoke. Here it was, sitting by the fireside, that a genial stranger,

an Anglican priest, joined himself to the wayfarer's company; and with little preface began a fierce attack on an institution which he entitled the Kirk of Scotland. I have no objection to the accents of my native land, provided you speak Scotch throughout; but it seems. needless, and is somewhat offensive, to use a single Scotch word in speaking English. Those interested in the institution in question prefer that it should be called (as indeed it invariably is, unless by a small section of Englishmen) the Church of Scotland. Such is its legal designation. And that designation expresses the fact about it: for it is the Church of the majority of Scotch people. And if you reckon with it two communions which, though not at present conforming to it, have copied its government and worship, you reckon (as plain fact) eighty per cent. of the entire population. Of the remaining twenty per cent. the Church of Rome claims twelve. And the little Scotch Episcopal communion, some of whose members are silly and insolent enough to speak of their communion as the Church in Scotland, has just one Scotchman and a half in every hundred, or one-seventy-fifth part of the population. It is plain that if that little communion represents the Church of Christ in Scotland, Scotland must be in a bad way. But one who knows Scotland well may venture to say, that in this respect Scotland will never be in a better. Words cannot express the amused contempt with which the hard, common-sense Scotch understand. ing regards all sacerdotal claims. Let not the writer be misunderstood by such as take the trouble of understanding him at all. He is a high churchman; as much so as any loyal son of the Church of Scotland can be. And if you read the doctrinal standards of that Church, you will discern that their

doctrine is quite high enough, on the two or three testing points which will not be discussed on this page. And the writer is a National Churchman: while in Scotland he belongs to the Church of Scotland, in England he conforms loyally to the Church of England: no Anglican-born can love that grand Church better than he, nor can enjoy her worship more devoutly. But like many more, he holds that there is no church-government which is so exclusively right as to make every other church-government wrong. He holds that the Catholic Church manifests itself in each different country in that form which is congenial to the nature of the people who dwell there; and he is perfectly sure that a democratic national church suits the Scotch race, as a hierarchical suits the English. He therefore believes that the Church of Scotland is the right thing in Scotland, and the Church of England the right thing in England. And he acts on that belief; as the best and wisest in the land do.

Let a word be permitted here by way of parenthesis. I beheld with profound disgust the elation of some 'good folk when a certain Archbishop and a very uncertain Bishop lately conducted divine ser vice in a Scotch parish church. They did so at the first look it seemed merely a natural and fit thing that men to whom the law of the land has given a certain position in England, should, coming to Scotland, obey the law of which they are the creatures, and conform to the church by law established there. But the sturdy founders of the Scotch church (some of whom for conscience sake refused bishoprics) would not have sounded a jubilant trumpet because a couple of prelates had (as it seemed) recognised their church. If the prelates recognise the church, it is merely a matter of If they do not, who cares a

course.

penny?