cation which took place between the Puritan mayor, John Wayte, and the fellows of Lincoln College, on November 17th (St. Hugh's Day), 1561.

St. Hugh's Day had formerly been the gaudy day of Lincoln College; and in 1561, the fellows of Lincoln, after dining in hall, adjourned to the church of All Saints to amuse themselves with a turn at bell-ringing. Anthony à Wood represents that they had no object in thus sounding their fine peal of bells, apart from a desire for suitable recreation by means of an art in which they excelled; but it is probable that they were not unmindful of Queen Mary's death, or unwilling to recall her memory by a brilliant feat of campanology. Anyhow the most offensive construction was put on their conduct by Master John Wayte, the mayor of the city, whose ears had no sooner caught the resonance of the All Saints' bells, than he hastened to the church to demand how the ringers presumed to render such honour to the late queen. The door of the belfry was closed, and the angry mayor was constrained to knock more than once and raise no little hubbub before he could gain admitance to the campanologists. At length, however, he effected an entrance; and, having forced himself into the presence of the ringers, he reviled them as Papists for thus ringing a dirge to the Popish queen. Dismayed by the mayor's vehemence, and fearful lest the affair would bring them into trouble, most of the ringers began to stammer out assurances that they had rung only for amusement's sake and out of no regard to the dead queen; when one of the offenders. a gentleman of rare inventiveness and self-possession-silenced his comrades, and extricated them from a perilous embarrassment by a statement which no one but a person endowed with a genius for lying could have uttered on the spur of the moment. Reminding the mayor that, if Mary had died on St. Hugh's Day, it was also on that same day that her successor had been proclaimed, the ready and subtle gentleman averred that he and his fellowcollegians had rung the peal in honour of their sovereign's accession, and not in regret for her predecessor's death. In fact, they were ringing altogether for joy at having gained a Protestant ruler, and in no degree for sorrow at having lost a Catholic sovereign. Whereupon,' says the annalist, 'the mayor,

going away satisfied, caused St. Martin's bells to be rung, and as many others as he could command. From hence the custom grew in Oxford to ring on that day during her reign (for so also it appears in the rolls of several parish churches accompted, wherein this still runneth,-" Item, to the ringers on St. Hugh's Day"), as also on the days of coronation and births of kings and princes, which yet remaineth.'

Another device of campanology, still practised in many parts of England, is the method by which ringers at the end of funereal ringings signify whether the deceased person was a man, a woman, or a child. In case of a child's interment, where this custom is observed, the ringing ends with three solemn knells-a stroke or 'teller' for each person of the Sacred Trinity. The ringing for a woman's death concludes with six strokes-two knells for each of the Sacred Persons. The bell music for a man terminates with a yet higher multiple of three. The campanological rule, as it is ordinarily enunciated by a rustic ringer, for this practice, runs,-Three for a child, six for a woman, and nine tellers make a man.'

CHAPTER X.

VICAR OF BRAY.

URING the religious struggles that occupied the interval

between Henry the Eighth's rupture with Rome and the secure establishment of the Reformed Church under Elizabeth, England witnessed no such secession of ordained persons from the clerical ranks as the voluntary retirement of the two thousand ministers who, on the restoration of episcopacy by Charles the Second, simultaneously relinquished the preferments and offices which they might no longer retain on terms reconcileable to their consciences.

On the contrary, the English clergy exhibited a singular plasticity to the wishes of civil authority, and moved to and fro -now in the direction of Rome, and now in the direction of Geneva; at one time declaring their enthusiasm for episcopal rule and at another manifesting seasonable tolerance of the Presbyterian method,-in accordance with the fashion of the hour, and the policy of the existing government. Nor are we justified in attributing exceptional baseness to the ecclesiastics who, thus veering with the wind, obeyed forces which they were powerless to resist, and took timely heed for their personal interests amidst the perplexities and distractions of a revolutionary period. They were men, and in this respect they acted after the wont of men under circumstances of like difficulty,-effecting successive compromises between their notions of what was right and their perceptions of what was obviously needful; consenting on compulsion to do for a time what they secretly hoped they should not be required to do for long; complying from mingled motives of private policy and public necessity with arrangements which they regarded as provisional and temporary innovations. It was thus that the majority of our

priesthood—at heart sincerely attached to the Catholic system and traditions-accepted new laws and satisfied new exigencies during the later years of Henry the Eighth, and throughout the reign of Edward and the earlier years of Elizabeth. Thus, on the other hand, a considerable section of the Anglican Reformers, bending to the storm which menaced them with destruction, said masses at the Marian altars, whilst longing for the time when they should be again called upon to read English prayers in the naves of the churches. The censors, who are nowadays most vehement in declaring disdain for this clerical pliancy, would most probably have displayed the same prudent moderation and politic plasticity, had they lived either as priests or laymen in the restless and perilous days which gave birth to our Established Church.

When the Anglican clergy were required by their sovereign on the one hand to acknowledge his spiritual supremacy, and by the Pope on the other hand to prove their devotion to his rule by withdrawing themselves from the realm of the excommunicated king, no one having any knowledge of the instincts and governing principles of human nature imagined for a moment that the Catholic ecclesiastics would generally endeavour to obey the latter order. Before they could have taken the first steps to gratify the pontiff's arrogance, they would have been seized by the servants, and thrown into the prisons, of a king who did not fear to enforce submission to his despotic will by inflicting death on dignified ecclesiastics and laymen of the highest rank. The monarch, who beheaded a venerable prelate and an exemplary chancellor for declining to acknowledge his supremacy, and who did not hesitate to commit priors and monks to ignominious deaths for no worse offence than their conscientious inability to declare him the head of the Church, was a terrible power, with whom such humble mortals as country rectors and provincial curates had better not trifle. The Pope was at.a distance, the king was at hand; and knowing well that to repudiate the sovereign's supremacy sent the recusant to death, the clergy, with a few exceptions, verbally gave up the Pope for a time, soothing their disturbed consciences by reflecting that they were taking the only course by which they could hope to promote the interests of the true Father of the Church. Their

disobedience was thus regarded even at Rome, whence permission soon came to the Catholic clergy of England to render all the external concessions that triumphant heresy demanded of them. So long as they were true at heart to the Pope, and zealous for the welfare of the Church, they might be false to their spiritually-deposed king, and in fighting heresy with fraud they might exercise their own discretion in deciding what evasions and flat perjuries might be justifiably employed for the attainment of righteous victory. Upon this understanding with the Holy Father, the most severely conscientious of the English Catholic clergy, alike during Henry's later years and throughout Edward the Sixth's reign, deemed themselves not only justified, but righteously engaged, in discharging the functions of Reformed priests, and at the same time secretly plotting to re-establish the Papal power within the English kingdom.

There is no doubt that a large proportion of the Marian clergy acted with perfect honesty and sincere delight in relinquishing the Protestant professions and usages of King Edward's days, and proclaiming themselves true members of the one and everlasting Catholic Church; for in many parts of the country their conversion-or rather, let us say, the revelation of their real sentiment-preceded the legal re-establishment of Papal authority. Before the mass had been formally ordered, the clergy hastened to celebrate it in most of our important towns. Anthony à Wood tells us of the zeal and pleasure with which the fellows of the Oxford colleges, and the priests of the Oxford churches who had apparently gone with the Reformers in King Edward's days-on Mary's accession brought out the mass-books and Catholic vestments, the images and pictures, the crucifixes and relics, which, instead of having been destroyed in compliance with successive injunctions for their demolition, had merely been stowed away in cellars and secret closets until it should once again be lawful to exhibit and use them. And these doings of the Oxford Catholics accorded with the performances of the national priesthood in other parts of the kingdom. Nor did the genuinely Protestant minority of the unmarried clergy generally manifest any strong disinclination to accommodate themselves to the crisis by adopting the sacerdotal