century, (except to Dr. Jenner's funeral), and I should not be surprised that one of the main reasons of his absence is, that, as he knows his bones will one day lie there, he thinks he will have to spend quite enough of time within its borders when dead, not to trouble it more than he can help while living.

It may be all very well, my Lord, to have morning prayers at home in the baronial hall or the private chapel, (which of course, if you don't go to the public services, you have), but I think a great and powerful nobleman ought to use his parish church as something more than a kind of tomb-house for "the Capulets.' What effect does he expect his example to have upon his dependents, his servants, and his tenantry-how does he expect that they will attend the church, when they know that their great feudal Lord has not been within its doors for perhaps twenty years? I am sorry for this; I declare I am, for I am no Radical: but a great admirer of aristocracy. I should think it a splendid thing if I had a long line of ancestors stretching back into by-gone centuries, until their grim faces could no longer be distinguishable in the mist of antiquity or to have them hanging in armour and furred robes against old oak wainscotted rooms; buť as I have neither, I like to admire them in others,-I like to run back in imagination to the stout old barons whose bones are now filling the Berkeley mausoleum, yet who long, long ago, walked about the castle courts in suits of sheet iron, and I think it is a pity that one of their descendants, who has as much brains and baronial pride as the best of them, should not set those around him a better example, so far at least as refers to church-going. He may think it a "slow thing" to sit two hours in a cold church in dull contiguity to the sarcophagus of his ancestors: but he must not forget that the hour is coming when his own lead coffin'scutcheoned and coronetted it is true, but still his coffin-shall be deposited by their side, and then comes the time (as his own vicar, the Rev. Seaton Kar, will

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tell him) for reconciling the inequalities of this life. I know this is too public a place to read his Lordship a lecture, but I should like to dine with him some day alone, and when the servants had retired, and the shades of evening were thickening around his old grey towers, to reason with him (if I were worthy to do so) like St. Paul with Felix, of "righteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come," so as to be able at least to prevail upon him to go to Church more than once in the twenty-five years.

From the Lord, however, I must now return to the vicar of Berkeley. I said the service was admirably performed, and that a stranger, previously knowing nothing of the place, would say on a single visit to the Church, that it was amongst the most fortunate parishes in the kingdom. I wish I could conclude here; but I am sorry to say there are many complaints, and I am still more sorry to add there are some grounds for them. The Rev. Seaton Kar is what is emphatically called a fox-hunting parson. I am no Puritan to seek to class the manly and noble sports of the field amongst the sins of commission; but I think I may say, as a general principle, that a clergyman may be much better employed than in participating in them, especially when he has a populous and extensive parish, containing four thousand souls to attend to, which is the case with Mr. Kar, who does not even keep a curate to look after his pastoral care while he is riding after his Lordship's hounds twice or three times a-week in the season. If ever an old church-going gossip had such a phenomenon as a sporting reader, he will be able to corroborate what I say he will doubtless be in a position to tell you that the Vicar of Berkeley is one of the most zealous and forward members of that hunt. He does not, it is true, "sport the pink" and blue collar; but I wish he did, as this would be infinitely more decent than mounting the silver fox on his black coat, which is his usual practice. If a cleryman will hunt, let him hide himself as soon as possible in the general

hue and habit of those with whom he is surrounded, and not draw down upon his sacred profession the jeers of the field, by hunting in a kind of semi-clerico harlequinade. Fancy a number of men charging a fence, and, foremost amongst them, the Vicar of Berkeley, with his badged black coat and his silk stockings showing coyly, but with evident display, above the summit of his top-boots; while his lordship, plodding along in the rear, bellows out, "There goes the parson!" What a picture of pastoral self-denial and care, especially if you consider the possibility of a funeral waiting for him at that moment, and it may be for an hour previously, in Berkeley churchyard.

As if hunting, however, did not encroach sufficiently on Mr. Kar's clerical duties, he is also a magistrate; so that the little surplus of time left to his four-thousand parishioners may be better imagined than described. It is, therefore, hardly to be wondered at, "if such things be," that schism should flourish rather rankly in the neighbourhood. Mr. Kar does not want for talents or intelligence-he can plead no brutish insensibility to the awful responsibility of his situation. I, therefore, ask him seriously and in all friendly though solemn feeling, to re-consider his ordination vow. There are four-thousand immortal souls, he should recollect, committed to his charge.

In conclusion I would add a word or two. I have said that the parish of Berkeley contains four-thousand inhabitants, and I have also stated that the Vicar keeps no curate-am I mistaken when I say there is a law which empowers the Bishop of the Diocese to appoint a curate to a parish so circumstanced, when the incumbent neglects to do so? No man is likely to know better whether this be the case or not than the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, for few are better fortified with or informed in ecclesiastical law; yet I am satisfied his Lordship-if such a power were reposed in him-would not shrink from enforcing it in an instance

like Berkeley, where four-thousand parishioners are left to the sole" care" of a fox-hunting Vicar.

Some have accused me of injuring the church, by speaking plainly where there is occasion to do so. My answer is, in the words of the satirist-" Stultorum incurata pudor malus ulcera celet."

The church is dedicated to the Virgin Mary.*

* For a strange account of the mode by which Godwin effected the suppression of the conventual establishment which existed here in the reign of Edward the Confessor, see Atkins's "Glostershire."

Rev. Dr. Pusey.

I suppose most of my readers will do, as the Editor of the Bristol Times did when I presented this paper to him on Monday last, start at the ominous name at the head of it. But I have no fear of faggots-the day is gone by when people used to waste their fuel on one another, and Smithfield is now to my mind more suggestive of roast mutton than roast martyrs. I have, therefore, no apprehension for my personal safety or my subject, fortified as I feel I am in all the fervour of my Protestantism, by the new police and a whole pile of statute books.

Curious to hear the man who, noiseless himself, had yet made such a noise in the world, I went to Clifton Church on last Christmas-day, and had the mortification to find that, so far as Dr. Pusey was concerned, I had my walk for nothing. It was purposed, I was told, that he should preach, but some two or three red hot gentlemen having intimated their intention to walk out of the church with marked and significant stampings the moment he mounted the pulpit, the Professor consented, for the sake of peace, to waive his permission. I was thus again, for the third or fourth time, deprived of an opportunity of seeing and hearing a nian who has unwittingly given a name to one of the two great parties that hold divided and, as it were, defiant sway in the Anglican Church. The fact is, clergymen have begun to be so much frightened of late about the movements and "perversions" that are daily chronicled, that they are afraid to open their pulpits to any of the men who have been ostensibly identified, or proximately or remotely associated, with the events that