having been planted here; they are ever appropriate in graveyards, and would be especially so at this church, on account of its position on the hills.

The services of the day were performed by the Rev. P. E. Boissier himself, assisted at the altar by the Bishop of London (then on a visit at Malvern) and the Rev. F. Hopkinson, the then intended curate; there was a very large and respectable congregation, the bulk of which had assembled evidently with a two-fold object, to see the Bishop of Londen, and to add their mites towards defraying the incidental expenses attendant on the conduct of divine service at this church, which, being only a district one, is not yet adequately endowed. The chanting and psalm singing were tolerably well performed: the organ is a grinder, and the school children are the singers. The schools here, I understand, comprise about fifty boys, and an equal number of girls. The whole services were impressively conducted, with the exception perhaps of that portion which devolved upon the clerk, whose shrill piping was occasionally somewhat startling.

The bishop having ascended the pulpit, selected for his text the 1 Cor. xvi, 2-" Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come." Upon this the right reverend prelate founded an exhortation to his hearers in favour of almsgiving and benevolence. His lordship possesses a fine, open, dignified countenance; his manner of arguing is quiet, calm, and collected, and his style a paradigm for imitation. In beholding him, one feels at once the influence of a superior mind, apparently capable of illuminating the abstruser points of ethics and divinity, and of elucidating matters which in his usual discourses he would rather avoid or but slightly glance at. In a word, his sermons would seem to be but the chapter heads, so to speak, of his lordship's knowledge: he presents rather the result than the process of his reasoning; but in all things he "preaches as one having authority;" and occasionally, on administering one of his home truths, he accompanies it with

a sharp nod of the head-an equivalent to saying “There, I know that must go home to some of your consciences, and you may do the best you can by it." The bishop in this instance applied himself to show-first, the duty incumbent on Christians of dedicating a due proportion of their goods for religious and benevolent purposes; and, secondly, of making that dedication on the day set apart by the church for the purpose of doing honour to its divine head, and for the promotion of her own spiritual growth. His lordship first castigated the Socialists, showing that their opinions had arisen from a deplorably mistaken view of the practices of the primitive church with regard to its temporal effects. The community of goods was in some measure necessary to the infant church, which was surrounded by Jews and Pagans, who refused its members even the common offices of charity and good-will; but there was nothing in history, or the writings of the apostles or fathers, to warrant the general adoption or the continued use of such a practice. The 38th article of the church set forth that "the riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast. Notwithstanding, every man ought, of such things as he possesseth, liberally to give alms to the poor, according to his ability." The case of the rich young man, who was told to sell all that he had and give to the poor, was evidently an extraordinary one; and his lordship observed that where individuals were thus called to the ministry it might be necessary "to leave all and follow Him," to become abstracted from all worldly objects and desires, and to administer at his altars in oneness of purity and truth. (How, thought I, can his lordship reconcile this theory-too beautiful for the frailty of humanity— with the possession of several thousands per annum and a fine palace on the banks of the Thames.) The right rev. prelate regretted the miserable contraction, in these degenerate days, of the good old custom of almsgiving; he besought the more favoured classes, who walked on vantage ground and in the sunshine of life, to descend occasionally into the valley of misery

and discourse with and relieve their distressed fellow beings, and to seek to reëstablish that relationship between the various classes of society which subsisted in older times in this country. He did not question the wisdom of a legal provision for the poor, but he asserted that such a provision tended to check the sympathies of Christian charity. [If this were the opinion which guided the majority of the Commission, of which his lordship was an influential member, and on whose report the New Poor Law was founded, there can be no doubt that by bringing the provision for the poor down to a near approximation to nothing, and interposing in the way of procuring that wretched pittance every species of obstacle, hindrance, and disgust, they used their best endeavours to reduce their views of Christian charity into practice.] People were too apt to delude themselves with the notion that the payment of poor rates was an equivalent for works of benevolence; he, however, would warn them that no such payment would ever form an item of those good deeds which ascended to heaven and were recorded there. The second portion of the sermon was an endeavour to show that the church was the place, and the Sabbath the day most fitting to make eleemosynary offerings, which would then form the substantial part of our sacrificesthe incense to accompany our prayers; and that the clergy were the most proper vehicles for the distribution of these gatherings. I shall not quarrel with the right rev. prelate for the kind consideration for the poor which breathed throughout his discourse; indeed I was delighted to hear such noble sentiments from one whose wealth no doubt enables him to set a worthy pattern in these matters; but, setting aside the contradictory portions of his discourse, upon which I commented as they occurred, I think his lordship is yearning after a revival of practices which are now for ever buried with past generations, and more than that, which are not worth revivication. The custom of collecting alms during the reading of the offertory was discontinued on sufficient grounds, and it would be inexpedient to revive it now. The church and the people are both

altered: at the time of the suppression of the monasteries, the resources of the poor having been suddenly cut off, it seemed desirable, nay, imperative, that the reformed Church should continue to supply what the old Church had been accustomed to give. The voluntary collection, however, soon became insufficient, and was at length superseded by the Poor Laws; and, as the Rev. H. Raikes, the Chancellor of Chester, has truthfully observed, "Though there is still abundant scope for Christian charity in relieving those wants which the law does not or will not reach, it does not now seem necessary or expedient to close every sermon with an appeal to the benevolence of a congregation, who are already convinced of the duty of almsgiving, and who give perhaps according to their ability."

The bishop's appeal produced a liberal collection; but I must here enter my protest against the modus operandi by which it was secured. The practice of shaking a plate under the nose of each individual in the congregation is one of the meanest, most disagreeable, and suspicious kind of things, that ever emanated from a conventicle. It is founded upon the suppositiona contemptible one to a dignified mind-that a man should be compelled to be a liberal, although he would be glad of the opportunity of shuffling out of it. The Dissenters call this the voluntary principle-there is no compulsion about it according to their theory, but if the plate passes by without receiving your shilling-whether you happen to possess one or not-you of course are singled out as an individual without either heart, soul, or (which is perhaps worse) cash. Now in deeds of benevolence it profiteth a man nothing unless he give with the heart as well as the hand; why, therefore, will you do an ungracious act for the purpose of extorting from him that pittance which perhaps his greedy eye follows with a covetous regret? It is a mask for hypocrisy, whereby the man appears to the eye of society what he is not before God. The custom ought no longer to be tolerated.

The patron and incumbent of the district church of Malvern Wells is the Rev. P. E. Boissier. No curate is kept. Mr. Robert Warrender is the clerk, and Mr. Thomas Woodyatt sexton.

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Barnard's Green.

NE of my most refined pleasures has ever been, early on a Sabbath morning, to seek the rural lanes and the quiet retired spots and the village churchyard, when yet "the grass was all besprent with dew;" and though our nature, when it journeys again toward the earth, is, as the bard of Avon says, "all fitted for the journey, dull and heavy," and we feel inclined, when we have passed the grand climacteric of our primest days, to leave the early rising and the other activities of life to younger and abler hands, yet there is an extraordinary pleasure, "once in a way," of reviving our recollections of these earlier pleasures, when the senses, not impaired or blunted by the advances of age, would voyage forth on their matin cruise, drinking deeply of the ravishing delights of the young world. Taking advantage of what proved to be the last fine Sunday of the autumn of 1845, I set out with the early bird towards the village or hamlet of Barnard's Green, to which I had been specially invited by an agricultural friend, who wished me to inspect a remarkable field of Burletta wheat, and likewise a prime round of beef, which he had promised should garnish his mahogany. A rich mist foretold a hot day, and I hastened on through meadows and corn fields; the heavy crops hung in golden clusters; the orchard trees bent their loaded arms to the earth; and the hedges were sprinkled with hay, which their vagrant, thorny scouts had captured from the passing waggons. All was beautiful, except to the eye of the economist; nature was wild and profuse, but she was also extravagant; here were hedges, and ditches, and waste land, which, if properly cultivated, would have provided half the labourers in the county with a good garden. With regard to the enclosure of commons and pieces of waste, such as these about Barnard's Green, which I presume have scarcely altered their appearance since the