of literary nutrition: honourably and scholastically capable of
out-classing the rival for whose displacement I plead; and competent
at once to put yet better light with wholesomer sustenance and rarer
spiritual food into the minds of its privileged students.

The ideas and principles conceived by the once editors and publishers
of the volume whose richly bestraught merits I champion, and whose
solemn rights I plead, (in the year 1871), was to place in society
at once, all electrified, au prémier coup canonized (armed at
all points), a work which should at a moment be complete in law;
self-contained and academically referable to the stringent junctures
of an ecclesiastical, a national, and a polyphonetic tribunal: a
work which should loyally attract the acclaim of co-existing literary
hymnals, and ever would, it was reverently hoped--a sentiment which I,
for one, favourably concur in--remain, the key-symbol of the Reformed,
Anglican faith, with its near, true, and ever new ally--a note as
high, silvery and jurisprudential; purified domestic co-partnership!

To further substantiate and enhance my devoutly expressed remarks, I
confidently state that the compilation of "Hymns Ancient and Modern"
was not originally in fact the outcome of an individual movement, or
yet of a moment. At periods diverse, and at stages various, it matured
its conditional purpose by repeated acts of regeneration and reform,
by keeping generally within the radius of a stereotyped policy of
pruning and paring; which consolidated by degrees and swept it on to
the confines and the platform of its national respectability.

Be it even tacitly acknowledged, in surveying the genesis of Hymnology
that the function of revision has once been, a fact, applied to the
"Hymns Ancient and Modern" since the appearance of "The Hymnary,"