consented to play the new harmonium, the clerk, village cobbler and
leader of parish orchestra, gave out the hymn in his accustomed fashion,
and then, with consummate scorn, bellowed out, "Now, then, Miss F----,
strike up!"

It would have been a far wiser policy to have reformed the old village
orchestra, to have taught the rustic musicians to play better, than to
have silenced them for ever and substituted the "grinstun" instrument.

[Illustration: THE VILLAGE CHOIR]

Archbishop Tait once said that there is no one who does not look back
with a kind of shame to the sort of sermons which were preached, the
sort of clergymen who preached them, the sort of building in which they
preached them, and the sort of psalmody with which the service was
ushered in. The late Mr. Beresford Hope thus describes the kind of
service that went on in the time of George IV in a market town of Surrey
not far from London. It was a handsome Gothic church, the chancel being
cut off from the nave by a solid partition covered with verses and
strange paintings, among which Moses and Aaron show in peculiar
uncouthness. The aisles were filled with family pews or private boxes,
raised aloft, and approached by private doors and staircases. These were
owned by the magnates of the place, who were wont to bow their
recognitions across the nave. There was a decrepit west gallery for the
band, and the ground floor was crammed with cranky pews of every shape.
A Carolean pulpit stood against a pillar, with reading-desk and clerk's
box underneath. The ante-Communion Service was read from the desk,
separated from the liturgy and sermon by such renderings of Tate and
Brady as the unruly gang of volunteers with fiddles and wind instruments
in the gallery pleased to contribute. The clerk, a wizened old fellow in