is no better course to avert the threatened loss and sacrilege than by communicating in quarters where such relics are held at their real value. I remain, Sir, Your very obedient Servant, W. H. S. Mary, Tarrant Gunville.-We have much satisfaction in publishing the following letter, from a gentleman who is a stranger to us: To the Editor of the Ecclesiologist. SIR,-Mr. Wyatt's memory certainly deceived him when he wrote in reference to S. Mary's, Tarrant Gunville, It was never intended to lengthen the nave at the expense of the chancel. The original plan was never given up: it has been faithfully adhered to." The enclosed engraved ground plan of the proposed enlargement shows a nave extended from three bays to five, with a much diminished chancel, from about twenty-three feet to seventeen feet. The chancel, as actually rebuilt, is at least six feet longer than that shown in the ground plan. I am confident that the plan of the chancel was thus altered after the appearance of your criticism in Vol. III., and I believe in consequence of it. Your correspondent is in error as regards the other points of which Mr. Wyatt complains. I am, Sir, Your faithful servant, COSSLEY D. SAUNDERS. Tarrant Hinton Parsonage, S. John's College, Cambridge, 22nd May, 1851. To the Editor of the Ecclesiologist. SIR,-The thanks of every member of the "brass rubbing" fraternity, and in fact of all ecclesiologists, would be awarded you, if through the medium of the Ecclesiologist, you could give a list of those parishes in England, whose churches contain rare and valuable specimens of that most interesting portion of mediæval art, the monumental brass; but which, through the arrangement, or rather dis-arrangement, of the pews, are lost to the collector of brass rubbings. There is scarcely a county in England but has brasses thus covered, or, which is the same thing, partially covered; and I am fully convinced that the evil is progressing. Churches are altered, and the brasses are removed, and doomed to solitary confinement in some vestry closet, or the ecclesiastic, warrior, or civilian is honoured with a stove, perhaps fixed permanently on his head, arms, or feet; but in many cases that have come under my notice, the brasses have been lost altogether. Surely it is time to prevent these proceedings advancing further; for at the rate brasses have been lost during the last twenty years, in a hundred there will be hardly one left in England. If I may be the means of your noticing this grievance, I shall be in some measure repaid for the distances I have travelled for the purpose of rubbing some brass or other which, through the carelessness of churchwardens or others, I have been unable to do. Your obedient Servant, J. D., C. C. A. S. Mr. White has communicated a paper, showing much ability, to the Exeter Architectural Society, in which he defends a design of his for a new church at Mythiam from the unfavourable criticism of that body, and shows that exclusive attention to the vertical principle, the horizontal principle being forgotten, will not conduce to the perfection of Pointed design. The two principles must each be represented, in due adjustment, in any successful building. Fasti Christiani, or Rhymes on the Kalendar, (Dolman, 1851) by the Rev. Mr. Maclaurin, must have come to us by mistake. The sacredness of the subjects touched upon, and the evident good meaning of the "poet," can scarcely make us refrain from amusing our readers by specimens of as bad doggrel as ever we met with. We observed in the Yorkshire Gazette of April 19th, forwarded by a correspondent, a decision by the Chancellor of York in a contested pew case in Middlesborough Church, in the course of which occur the following good remarks: "The counsel has uttered such observations as suitable to his rank and station in life.' I can only say that I have been in the habit, with my wife, of going weekly to Westminster Abbey, and we sit where we can-by one another, if possible; but if not, in different portions of the church, in no particular pew, and having no regard to either persons or places. By chance one day we may sit next to Mr. Sidney Herbert, and by chance another day we may sit by the side of one of the labourers employed in the service of the church. It is fortunate that of late a habit has grown up of removing pews in churches altogether, and thus so much of this miserable pride and attention to the rights thereof has been put aside." We are not aware of there being any legal remedy for the grievances complained of by J. D. We must recur to an interesting volume, just published, under the title "Reports and Papers read at the meetings of the Architectural Societies of the Archdeaconry of Northampton, the counties of York and Lincoln, and of the Architectural and Archæological Societies of Bedfordshire and S. Alban's, for the year 1850." London: J. Masters. We must postpone to our next number, owing to the pressure of matter, a notice of the Stones of Venice, a work for which, in its architectural aspect, we profess great sympathy and admiration. Theologically, we differ most widely from Mr. Ruskin's (shall we call it?) monomania. And we are glad to be spared the necessity of speaking our mind on his Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, which not even its ambiguous title brings within the limits of our pages. We are glad to see a correspondent of the Toronto " Church" quoting our notice of the wooden church at S. Francis' Harbour, Labrador, recommending attention to the proper principles of construction in wood. THE ECCLESIOLOGIST. “Surge igitur et fac: et erit Dominus tecum." No. LXXXV.-AUGUST, 1851. (NEW SERIES, NO. XLIX.) ON THE HISTORY OF HYMNOLOGY. A Paper read before the Ecclesiological late Cambridge Camden Society, on Monday, June 23rd, 1851, by the REV. J. M. NEALE, M.A., one of the Honorary Secretaries. It would be the height of presumption, if, in the limited time for which I shall occupy your attention, I pretended to give even the most popular outline of the vast history of Hymnology. My aim is simply to explain, -(persons who propose to use the Hymnal Noted may naturally wish it explained)—of what it consists; who were the writers, what is the date of its hymns, and with what authority they come to us. When the attention of the Ecclesiological Society was first turned to the subject of Hymnology, we could only act on the same principle which we have endeavoured to carry out in all things, that, if we were Catholics in the first place, we were English Catholics in the second. We felt that we could look for our hymns to only one source, the offices, or rather to use the proper old, as well as modern, word,— the services of the elder English Church. And of the various uses of that Church, the ritual of Sarum had so incomparably the most authority, that its hymns, we felt, were to be regarded as our especial inheritance; its hymns, I mean, as contradistinguished from later Roman corrections, or rather deformations of them on the one hand, and on the other from early or mediæval hymns, which, however beautiful, were never received in England. The Sarum Hymnal,—and I may perhaps mention, that a very convenient edition of it, which I hold in my hand, was published last year at the Littlemore press,-the Sarum Hymnal contains about one hundred and fifty hymns. Forty of these are translated in the Hymnal before you;-forty or fifty more, though not of equal importance, may at some future time appear in its second part ;-while the rest are either such as are not so well adapted to our present circumstances, or in some few instances, from their poverty or bad taste, undesirable in themselves. Of the hymns now before you, to name such of the authors as we know, five are certainly, or very probably, by S. Ambrose ;-one by Prudentius, two by Sedulius, two are Ambrosian, by which I mean of the period between S. Ambrose and S. Gregory, three by S. Gregory ; and these belong to the first period of Latin hymnology, when the Church was ridding herself of the shackles of quantity, and inventing rhyme. Three are by Venantius Fortunatus, who died in or about the year 609 one by S. Hrabanus Maurus, who died in 856: one by the Emperor Charlemagne : one by S. Fulbert of Chartres, who died in 1029: one by S. Bernard of Clairvaux, who died in 1153: two by unknown authors, but before the year 700; fifteen from the year 700 to the year 1000 and three of the eleventh or twelfth century. I will as briefly as possible now go through the authors whom I have mentioned. And first of S. Ambrose. I cannot characterize his hymns better than in the very masterly critique of Mr. Trench. After observing that there is a certain coldness in them, an aloofness of the author from his subject, a refusal to blend and fuse himself with it which disappoints a casual reader-and that the absence of rhyme, and the uniform use of a metre with singularly few resources for producing variety of pause or cadence, add to the feeling of disappointment, he proceeds, Only after a while does one learn to feel the grandeur of this unadorned metre, and the profound, though it may have been more instinctive than conscious, wisdom of the poet in choosing it; or to appreciate that noble confidence in the surpassing interest of his theme, which has rendered him indifferent to any but its simplest setting forth. It is as though, building an Altar to the Living God, he would rear it of unhewn stone, upon which no tool had been lifted. The great objects of faith in their simplest expression are felt by him so sufficient to stir all the deepest affections of the heart, that any attempt to dress them up, to array them in moving language, were merely superfluous. And suitably did the faith which was in actual conflict with, and was just triumphing over, the power of the world, find its utterance in hymns such as these,-wherein is no softness, little tenderness, but a rock-like firmness, the old Roman stoicism transmuted and glorified into that Christian courage, which encountered, and at length overcame the world." " The masterpiece of S. Ambrose is the immortal hymn, Veni, Redemptor Gentium, No. 5 in our Hymnal, Come, Thou Redeemer of the earth, Come, testify Thy Virgin birth." The Eterna Christi munera, No. 36 in our book, is a portion of a longer hymn of his, with the same beginning, for the commemoration of Martyrs. It was afterwards divided, a German critic says, miserably dilacerated, but with the criticism I hardly agree,-into two, for the festivals of Apostles, and for those of Martyrs; a new beginning being prefixed to the former. There are three others which are very probably by S. Ambrose,-those for the third, sixth and ninth hours;-the last of these, No. 7 in our book, shall now be sung to you. The melody to which it is given will be that appropriated to Epiphany tide, 71. in the Hymnal Noted. [Illustration:-Rerum Deus tenax vigor.] PRUDENTIUS, the prince of early Christian poets, who was born in Spain about the year 348, and died not earlier than 410, is the author of the Hymn, No. 16 in our book, for the Holy Innocents. It is in fact only the 32d and 33d stanzas of a hymn on the Epiphany composed of fifty-two. But as this length was totally out of the question for ecclesiastical purposes, (though the Spanish Church did use to sing these hymns right through) from a very early period centos were made out of it, and appropriated to different festivals. This hymn does not occur in the English books; which merely used those of the Common Service of Martyrs. It will now be sung, in the first place to the Mechlin Version of the Christmas evening melody, 16". in the Hymnal Noted, and then to the Sarum version, 161. [Illustration :-Salvete, Flores Martyrum.] The next hymn, 17 in the book, "Why, impious Herod, vainly fear," is merely the continuation of that marked 14, which begins, "From lands that see the sun arise." It is of British origin, being the composition of the Scotch poet Sedulius, who flourished about 430. It is in the original ABCDarian: that is, the verses begin with the consecutive letters of the alphabet, a trace of which, I see, has remained in the 14th hymn of our book, where the second verse begins with the letter B. This arrangement was not uncommon: there is another instance of it in the Salisbury Hymnal, in the hymn also for the Epiphany, which begins, A Patre unigenitus. The grand judgment hymn, the germ of the Dies Ira, which commences Apparebit repentina, is also of this nature. Nor is the device childish, since it must have been a great help to memory. We shall now take this 14th hymn to its proper Christmas morning melody, 14"-but, to spare time, shall confine ourselves to the first four verses, and the Doxology. [Illustration :-A solis ortus cardine.] Of Ambrosian hymns, taken in that limited sense which I just now attached to the term, there are only in our Hymnal (so far as we can speak with certainty) two. The one is the 31st, "Eternal Monarch, King Most High," which is an abbreviated form of a hymn of fourteen stanzas, of Spanish origin, possibly of Prudentius. Commentators explain the fourth verse Yea, Angels tremble when they see How changed is our humanity, That flesh hath purged what flesh had stained, And GoD, the Flesh of God hath reigned, The old by the fact that, whereas Angels allowed themselves to be adored before the Incarnation, as in the case of Daniel, they afterwards refused such honour from the flesh which our LORD had made His own. The other is the 39th, "The Merits of the Saints." This latter, one of the few hymns in a classic metre, we find quoted by Hincmar of Rheims, who professes that he could not discover the author. Hence we come to S. GREGORY the GREAT, who died in 604. Of his composition are the 3rd hymn, On this the day that saw the earth; |