PAROCHIAL HISTORIES.


We wonder why clergymen do not oftener write accounts of their parishes;
not mere statistical accounts, though these are most valuable, as witness
the contributions of the Scottish Clergy to the truly patriotic Sir John
Sinclair's work; but accounts comprehending every thing interesting to all
human beings, whatever be their political or religious creed. A
description of a church that has principally ceased to exist, is in
general very, very, very dry; inscriptions on tombstones, without comment,
or moral, are hard reading; an old pan dug up among rubbish proves a sore
affliction in the hands of the antiquary, and twenty pages quarto, with
plates, about a rusty spur without a rowel, is, in our humble opinion, an
abuse of the art of printing. But how easy--how pleasant, to mix up
together all sorts of information in due proportions into one whole, in
the shape of an octavo--epitomizing every kind of history belonging to the
parish, from peer's palace to peasant's hut! What are clergymen
perpetually about? Not always preaching and praying; or marrying,
christening, and burying people. They ought to tell us all about it; to
moralize, to poetize, to philosophize; to paint the manners living as they
rise, or dead as they fall; to take Time by the forelock, and measure the
marks of his footsteps; to show us the smoke curling up from embowered
chimneys; or, since woods must go down, to record the conquests of the
biting axe; to celebrate the raising of every considerable roof-tree, to
lament all dilapidations and crumbling away of ivied walls; to inform us
how many fathoms deep is the lake with its abbeyed island--why the pool
below the aged bridge gets shallower and shallower every year, so that it
can no more shelter a salmon--what are the sports, and games, and pastimes
of the parishioners--what books they read, if any--if the punishment of
the stocks be obsolete--or the stang--or the jougs--if the bowels of the