In

tionable; not that I would contend for it, but neither would I complain of it. Some freedom in the Service the minister certainly should have; some power of insertion to suit the particular time and place; some power of explaining on the spot whatever is read from the Scriptures, which may require explanation, or at any rate, of stating the context. It does seem to me that the reforms required in our Liturgy and Service are so obvious, and so little affect the system itself, that their long omission is doubly blameable. But more remains behind, and of far greater difficulty:-to make the Church at once popular and dignified, to give the people their just share in its government, without introducing a democratical spirit, to give the Clergy a thorough sympathy with their flocks, without altogether lowering their rank and tone. When Wesley said to his ministers, that they had no more to do with being gentlemen than with being dancing-masters, τὸ μὲν ὀρθῶς εἶπε, τὸ δὲ ἥμαρτεν. Christ's communication with His Apostles there is always a marked dignity and delicacy, a total absence of all that coarseness and vulgarity into which Wesley's doctrine would infallibly lead us. Yet even in Christ, the Lord and Master of His Disciples, there is a sympathy, which is a very different thing from condescension, a spirit of unaffected kindness and, I had almost said, of sociability, which the spirit of gentlemanliness has doubtless greatly dulled in the Church of England. "I have called you friends," is a text which applies to the Christian minister in his dealings with his brethren and equals, in an infinitely stronger degree than it could do to Him, who was our Lord and Master, and whose calling us brethren was not of nature, but out of the condescension of His infinite love. And he who shall thus far keep and thus far get rid of the spirit of gentlemanliness, would go near to make the Church of England all but perfect, no less in its popularity than in its real deserving of popularity, naì περὶ μὲν τούτων εἰρήσθω ἐπὶ τοσοῦτο, ἄνειμι δὲ ἐπὶ τὸν ἄνω λόγον.

July, 1831.

2. Again (at Glasgow) the Scotch minister's sermon struck me as addressed more ad clerum than ad populum; and and again more than ever I felt the superiority of our service. I cannot say how doubly welcome and impressive I thought the Lord's Prayer, when the minister (to my surprise by the way) used it before the sermon. Nothing, it seems to me, can be worse than the introductory prayers of the Scotch Service, to judge from what I have hitherto heard; the intercessory prayer after the sermon is far simpler, and there the discretion given to the minister is often happily used. But altogether, taking their Service as it is, and ours as it is, I would far rather have our own; how much more, therefore, with the slight improvements which we so easily might introduce-if only-But even to the eleventh hour we will not reform, and therefore we shall be not, I fear, reformed, but rudely mangled or overthrown by men as ignorant in their correction of abuses as some of us are in their maintenance of them. Periodical visitations of extreme severity have visited the Church and the world at different times, but to no human being is it given to anticipate which will be the final one of all. Only the lesson in all of them is the same. "If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" And in each of these successive "comings" of our Lord, how little is the faith which He has found even among His professed followers! May He increase this faith in me, and those who are dearest to me, ere it be too late for ever!

VII.-TOUR IN FRANCE.

Dover, August 11, 1837.

1. Twenty and twenty-two years ago I was backwards. and forwards at this place, being then a young man with no wife or children, but with a mother whose house was my home, with a brother, aunt and sisters. Ten, eight, and seven years ago, I used to be also passing often through

here; I had then lost my dear brother, and latterly my dearest mother, and I had a wife and children; I had also a sister living here with her husband and children. Now, after another period of seven years, I am here once more; with no mother or aunt, with no remains left of my early home; my sister who did live here has lost her husband, and now lives at Rugby; but I have not only my dearest wife with me, but-a more advanced stage of life-three dear children are with us, and their pens are all busy with their journals, like their mother's and mine. So Dover marks very strikingly the several periods of my life, and shows me how large a portion of my space here I have already gone through.

Then for the world at large. When I first came here, it was so soon after Napoleon's downfall, that I remember hearing from one of the passengers in the packet the first tidings of Labedoyere's execution. At my second and third visits, the British army still occupied the north of France. My second period of coming here, from 1825 to 1830, marked the last period of the old Bourbon reign in France, and the old Tory reign in England. When I last landed here, it was in the brief interval between the French and Belgian Revolutions: it was just after the triumphant election of 1830 in England, which overthrew the ministry of the Duke of Wellington, and led to the Reform Bill. And now we seem to be witnessing the revival of Toryism in England, perhaps of the old Bourbon principles in part in France. The tide is turned, and will advance no higher till the next flood; let us only hope that its ebb will not be violent; and in the meanwhile our neighbours have got rid of the white flag, and we have got rid of the rotten boroughs of Schedule A. This is a clear gain; it is a question whether the positive good which either of us have gained, is equal to the positive evil which we have destroyed; but still in the course of this world, Seeva the Destroyer is ever needed, and in our imperfect state the very deliverance from evil is a gratification and a good.

On Saturday last we were at our delicious Westmoreland home, at that dear Fox How, which I love beyond all other spots of ground in the world, and expatiating on the summit of our familiar Fairfield. There on a cloudless sky we were beholding the noble outline of all our favourite mountains; the Old Man, Wetherlam, Bow Fell, Sea Fell, Great Gable, the Langdale Pikes, the Pillar, Grassmoor, Helvellyn, Place Fell, High Street, High Bell; there we saw Ulleswater and Coniston, and our own Winandermere, and there too we looked over a wide expanse of sea of the channel which divides England from Ireland. On Tuesday last we were at our dear Rugby home; seeing the long line of our battlements and our well-known towers backed by the huge elms of the school field, which far overtopped them; and looking on the deep shade which those same elms, with their advanced guard of smaller trees and shrubs, were throwing over the turf of our quiet garden. And now, on Friday morning, we are at an inn at Dover, looking out on the castle and white cliffs which are so linked with a thousand recollections; beholding the sea, which is the highway from all the life of England to all the life of Europe, and beyond there stretches out the dim line of darker shadow which we know to be the very land of France.

And besides, in this last week, I have been at an Election; one of those great occasions of good or evil which are so largely ministered to Englishmen; an opportunity for so much energy, for so much rising beyond the mere selfishness of domestic interests, and the narrowness of mere individual or local pursuits; but an opportunity also for every base and bad passion; for corruption, for fear, for tyranny, for malignity. Such is an election, and such is all human life; and those who rail against these double-handed appointments of God, because they have an evil handle as well as a good, may desire the life of the Seven Sleepers, for then only can opportunities of evil be taken from us, when we lose also all opportunity of doing or of becoming good. However, even as an occasion of evil,

there is no doubt that our elections are like an inoculating for a disorder, and so mitigating; the party spirit and the feuds which now spend themselves in bloodless contests, would, if these were away, find a far more deadly vent; they solve that great problem how to excite a safe and regulated political activity.

We also in the course of the week have been travelling on the great railway from Manchester to Birmingham. The distance is ninety-five miles, which we accomplished in five hours. Nothing can be more delightful, as well as more convenient. It was very beautiful too, to be taken as it were, into the deepest retirement of the country, surprising lone farm-houses and outlying copses with the rapid darting by of a hundred passengers, yet leaving their quiet unbroken; for no houses have as yet gathered on the line of the railway, and no miscellaneous passers at all times of the day and night serve to keep it ever in public. Only at intervals, four or fives times a day, there rushes by the long train of carriages, and then all is as quiet as before.

We also passed through London, with which I was once so familiar; and which now I almost gaze at with the wonder of a stranger. That enormous city, grand beyond all other earthly grandeur, sublime with the sublimity of the sea or of mountains, is yet a place that I should be most sorry to call my home. In fact its greatness repels the notion of home; it may be a palace, but it cannot be a home. How different from the mingled greatness and sweetness of our mountain valleys; and yet he who were strong in body and mind ought to desire rather, if he must do one, to spend all his life in London, than all his life in Westmoreland. For not yet can energy and rest be united in one, and this is not our time and place for rest, but for

energy.

Chartres, August, 1837.

2. . . . . Chartres was a very fine termination of our tour. We stopped at the Hotel du Grand Monarque, on an open space just at the outside of the town, and from thence im