"Better

"But mass is

silent all these years!" "You love music, then?" we say. than anything else in the world," is his short reply. performed here still," we observe, "though there is no family." "Only low mass," he says, with that mournful cadence, "and, therefore, no music." "But do not you yourself play on the organ?" we inquire. "Yes," he answers, "when there is any one to blow; there is a man in the village who blows for me sometimes, and a servant in the house, when he has time. It is a splendid organ," says he, proudly, "with three sets of keys!" "Will you not play for us?" we ask. He looks at us with his melancholy eyes, as if measuring our worthiness for so great a privilege, and says, "Yes, I will." We leave the chapel, and ascending two flights of stairs, the first of which lands us on a level with the gilded gallery in which the great family had knelt to worship our Lord and His mother, we stand face to face with the mighty slumbering soul of music which that melancholy young man is about to awake. Of course if he plays we must blow; accordingly, mounting upon a low step, first one and then the other works the heavy iron lever which gives breath to the Leviathan; and the next moment the lofty chapel, from the highest centre of its roof to the lowest level of its floor, seems to throb and heave with the swelling pulsations of the most wonderful melody. It is hard work to blow that great organ, but light indeed for such a repayment; and not more astonishing than the pulsing, surging torrent of harmony which pealed forth into the silence is the total change in that young man's being. No longer dimeyed, dreamy and melancholy, he sits there an inspired musician, with flushed cheek and upturned eyes, as a brother of St. Cecilia might have appeared. First he gives expression to a low, mournful symphony, as if all the surrounding angels were lamenting the sorrows and humiliations of their church. Anything sadder, grander, or more hearttouching cannot be conceived. It is as if the immense sorrow with which our Lord wept over Jerusalem had here found expression. Then follows another strain. Above the lamenting voices of the angels is heard the triumph of the eternal church, which no time or change can overturn, the jubilant utterance of thousands and tens of thousands whose garments are washed white in the blood of the Lamb, who have come forward from great tribulation and suffering, from contumely and poverty, to be crowned kings rejoicing for ever and ever!

It is a wonderful inspiration. Pearly drops stand on the young man's brow; his eyes are upturned as if he gazes into the celestial life of which he has prophesied, and a smile of indescribable beauty plays round his parted lips. Thanks are poor payment for this surpassing entertainment; but he does not seem to expect them; and hastily wiping the keys and closing the organ front, he walks down stairs before us without a word. The least we can do is to wish, as we do heartily, that whichever branch, Catholic or Protestant, has come into possession, that true worship may be offered to the Divine Saviour and Teacher in that chapel, and that he may be its organist. But the

old melancholy, hopeless, and faded look has again taken possession of his countenance, and without a smile he watches us depart.

Again we are at a railway station. It is a hot summer's afternoon, and every object shines out bright and clear, as if traced and coloured with prismatic hues. Everywhere lie strong lights and deep shadows, and every colour is intensified by sunshine. Again the station-master's garden is full of flowers, and out of the cavities of tree-stumps, placed at regular intervals, flow, as it were, streams of colour; masses of snowy pinks, crimson campions, yellow sedums, and blue nepetu. The station-master's little children bask amongst the flowers, or play with a large white and fawn coloured setter, which quiescently flaps his bushy tail, and lazily snaps at the flies. The calm repose of summer sunshine is over all. The woods on the surrounding hills seem to sleep in the afternoon glow, swallows slowly skim about in pursuit of flies, but every other bird is still; not a song is heard, but only two cuckoos answering each other, like shout and echo. Labourers are leisurely at work, shovelling gravel on the line, and slowly amusing themselves with a poor joke about the sleepers on which the rails rest, and which one of them persists in calling slumber-planks. It seems inimitably witty to them, and the quiet laugh of the men, and the changes that are rung on the one idea, represented by sleeping and slumbering is, at all events, amusing, even to us for the moment.

Presently a gay party comes sweeping down the station steps. Three young ladies, as fresh as May mornings, in their delicate muslin dresses, with smart little jackets, and in coquettish hats and sweeping feathers, accompanied by three young men, their counterparts, in tourist-style of grey suit, in three varieties of shade, wide-awakes, each one more picturesque than the other, and bearded and moustached, each beard or moustache being of a more golden brown or richer black than his fellow. This is a model group, fit either for Brighton or Llandudno, and at once the silence and dreaminess of the scene is at an end. The station-master's children start up to look at them; the quiet jocularity of the sleeping and slumbering labourers is silenced in the gay silvery voices and laughter of the new group. They have brought animation with them. The railway porter, in his corduroy suit, comes forth from some hiding-place behind the station, and moves a ladder from one part of the platform to another. The station-master advances to his post. A country-woman in black, carrying a bundle, and a young lad in bran-new clothes, which sit awkwardly upon him, now descend the station steps and stand upon the platform, apart from the gay group, who pace hither and thither, and laugh at each other from a distance. But the country-woman and the boy notice nothing, think of nothing but that one great sorrow which is crushing their hearts-the parting just now at hand. Their shoes are dusty; they both look hot and weary; they have walked far, and have had many a painful and loving communion on the way. The woman looks almost stern with her suppressed emotion, the boy astonished and half scared. They have got the ticket, at least she has, and still

holding the bundle, as if she would not part with it till the last moment, she puts the ticket, with her own hand, into his waistcoat pocket, which in proof that he knows what he is about, he immediately takes out again, looks on it at both sides, and then gently returns to his pocket. As yet neither has said a word to the other; the laughter and merriment of the tourist party, as it sweeps hither and thither, matters nothing to them.

But now the porter rings the bell. An intimation has been received in some mysterious way that the train is approaching, and the mother, still holding his bundle, turns to the boy, in the corner of the platform, where they have stood from the first, and throwing her one disengaged arm round his neck, holds him for a long embrace, neither of them speaking. The train is in sight; people withdraw from the edge of the platform, and the mother, now putting the bundle into the boy's hand says, "Dunna forget, my lad; dunna forget! I shanna forget they (thee)!" "No, mother!" he said, shortly, and with his bundle mounted into a third-class carriage saying, from the window, before he seated himself, "I shall write when I'm on boord; yo'll get th' letter in a dee or tu." She nodded, but said nothing; and the train moved off; so did she, going slowly up the station steps, and wiping her eyes with the corner of her shawl.

The train leaves us in a different scene. We are in the midst of valleys which intersect round hills. Branch railways run up many of these valleys, and the tall chimneys of smelting-houses are seen at various distances, whilst behind or above many of the round hills columns of black smoke, rising slowly in the evening sunlight, or the deep shadow, as it may chance to be, tell that there also the same work prevails. It is a small mining region, not considerable enough to gather into its recesses a large town, but the scattered population for many miles along the valleys or on the hill sides, find here their employment, and the groups of men that we now and then see returning home for the night, have the smeared or swarthy look of the miner or worker in the smelting-house.

We are now on our road to Waystones, and leaving the mining station with its branch railways, we are directed by a miller with his fat horse and cart, heavily laden with flour sacks, who is just setting forth from the picturesque mill below, to take the road which he takes, up the steep hill before us, for he too is going to Waystones. We inquire the distance, and after more thought than we might have supposed the question demanded, we were informed "About three miles." Three miles! that is no great distance, we think; but as he seems dubious, "we pin our faith neither on his sleeve," nor yet on his flour bags. It is a very steep, long hill, and as the miller, his fat horse, and his heavy cart, meandering from side to side, make very slow progress, we go briskly a-head, pausing every now and then to rest, and look at the extensive landscape which is opening around us; one sweep of hills behind another, some wooded, others with a stern, bare outline, whilst far to the right, beyond the mining district which

we are leaving, arises stern and grey, a remarkably tall, stone church tower, so like a landmark in character, that it is almost impossible not to believe that the great ocean lies beyond that long barrier of hills. (To be continued.)

VIII.

THE ENDOWED SCHOOLS BILL.

THE measure to the character and prospects of which we propose to call the attention of our readers in this article, is destined, if we are not greatly mistaken, to excite at least as much public interest, and to encounter at least as determined an opposition as the Bill for the Abolition of Church Rates. Like that Bill, it will be met with open hostility, and will have to make its way in spite of the lukewarm support of friends of very questionable sincerity; and, like that Bill, it will serve to bring out sharply the practical difficulties of compromise between those who support and those who assail a principle so important as that involved in the exclusive privileges of the Established Church. A Bill has been brought into Parliament, which seems to those for whose benefit it was destined the plainest and most moderate measure of simple justice, and nothing more. By those with whose exclusive rights-or wrongs, it may be-it would interfere, it is treated as an act of impudent spoliation. Between parties entertaining such conflicting views it is not easy to see how any compromise tolerably satisfactory to either could be effected; and the result of the deliberations of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, charged with the thankless task of attempting it, has been just what might have been anticipated—a wretched milk-and-water affair, totally indefensible upon the principles of one party, and offering to the other a miserable dole of left-handed, eleemosynary relief (properly enough so called), which probably no one concerned in the concoction was weak enough to suppose would be accepted. Valuable time has been consumed upon this abortive effort to bring fire and water into peaceful and harmonious contact, but we do not know that it has been altogether lost. Under the most favourable circumstances, it would have been impossible, even supposing the Bill carried through Committee, read a third time, and passed in the Commons, to have made any serious progress with it in the House of Lords, this Session; the discussion would have been hurried, and the subject hustled out of the way, with that quiet indignity which awaits most topics, when the 12th of August is at hand; and the labours of the Select Committee have at least answered the purpose of demonstrating the futility of attempting to compromise questions of this kind.

The Bill originally brought into the House of Commons, at the beginning of the Session which has just terminated, by Mr. Dillwyn, Sir Richard Bethell, and Mr. Massey, recited by way of preamble, that "it is expedient that some restrictions at present imposed by law upon the government and teaching of many endowed schools and educational charities should be removed, and that the same should, unless otherwise intended by the founders thereof, be open to all subjects of the realm, without any distinction whatever." For the purpose of remedying the existing state of things, it proposed to enact that, "No endowed school or educational charity shall be deemed to have been founded for the purpose of affording religious instruction according to the doctrines of the Church of England exclusively, unless from the language of the instrument founding or endowing the charity, it shall appear that such was the intention of the founder thereof."

At first sight, an unprejudiced person would scarcely be prepared to see anything very iniquitous in this proposition; yet with the exception of one clause exempting certain universities and colleges from the operation of the Act, and another giving to it a short and intelligible title, we have cited the whole of the "Endowed Schools Bill"—a measure which probably most of our readers have heard and seen characterized as an outrageous scheme of robbery and confiscation. This assertion, however, in the ordinary language of politico-religious controversy merely means that a state of things, whether right in itself or not, attended by political and pecuniary advantages to the party raising the outcry is in some danger; and to persons familiar with the vocabulary in which such discussions are frequently conducted will not appear so startling as it otherwise might have done. The burden of proof certainly lies on those who lay it down that where the founder of an endowment has not particularized the religious views he intended to favour, the inference should be drawn, as a matter of course, that he intended to bestow his support upon one only of the numerous sections of religionists into which the mass of his fellowcountrymen is split up. A short notice of some of the principal decisions upon this subject will be interesting, as it will show the nature of the doctrines which guide our Courts of Equity in pronouncing upon the objects to which a charity of the kind in question shall be applied, and the degree in which the will of the founder, ascertained or ascertainable, has in practice been respected in such cases. It will not be necessary to go into them at any length, as our object is rather to bring clearly home to the reader the actual operation of the recognized doctrines of law with respect to this matter, than to present anything like a complete history of the cases to which they have been applied.

A charity was founded in the reign of Edward IV., by an inhabitant of Bury St. Edmund's, for the benefit of that town, in virtue of which certain lands were conveyed to trustees for several charitable purposes. The deed expressly set forth that the endowment was