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author, on its publication in 1843, sent a copy to a certain young Mr. Gladstone, then President of the Board of Trade in the Government of Sir Robert Peel, and, in his own words, though a hardworking official man,' with a decided predominance of religious over secular interests.'

The letter in which he acknowledged the book is curious, not only as an early example of his famous enigmatic style, but as giving his opinion on a subject of touching interest and consequence, surely, to all men-Prayers for the Dead :

13 Carlton House Terrace: Sexagesima Sunday, 1843.

REV. SIR,-I have postponed acknowledging the receipt of your work on the doctrine of Purgatory, of which you were so good as to present me with a copy on its publication, by no means from indifference to your kindness, but through the desire to be in a condition to return my thanks with a due appreciation of the volume, and therefore after having perused it, which I have now done.

It would be great presumption in me to speak of it otherwise than with the greatest submission; yet I feel myself indebted to you, not only as an individual for an act of courtesy, but also as a member of the Church for opposition offered with so much temper, charity, and learning to a false and at the same time a subtle and attractive doctrine. May it please God to bless the effort you have made.

I am tempted to suggest to you, with reference to the closing paragraphs of Chapter VII, a subject for thought, which has often occurred to my own mind. Does not the doctrine of habits, as taught by Bishop Butler, on the power of action in the formation of character, taken in connection with the undoubted truth of the joy and felicity of the souls of the just, seem to render it a rational and probable opinion, though of course it cannot thus become a tenet of religion, that their state is one of progressiveness; and if so, does not the inference arise that it is as such within the possible range of legitimate subjects of prayer?

I beg you will not suppose that I look for an answer; you will be well able to use the suggestion, if it be of the smallest weight, and to follow it out. I have the honour to be, Rev. Sir, your obliged and faithful servant. W. E. GLADSTONE.

But, besides books and sermons, his Reverence's long days saw a certain amount-to be sure, no very great amount-of parish visiting. It is true that City parishes, having then a larger resident population, afforded more scope for parochial work than they do now. But in those days the parson was regarded as the physician of the soul, exactly in the same sense as the doctor is the physician of the body; except in illness, people did not expect the services of either the one or the other.

True, in that pre-sanitary age, small-pox, cholera, and typhus still made their dreadful appearance even in the healthiest city in the world. Mr. Hall had all his life, and acknowledged

that he had, a great fear of death. But in the times of those visitations, his calm, cheerful face bent over many a sick bed, and he showed daily what is, after all, the highest form of courage-to be afraid, and to act as if one had no fear at all.

But it was not only, or chiefly, the parish that demanded spiritual ministrations-or, should one rather say, ministrations that were not so much spiritual as plain, practical, and good?

The four little girls stood in a row in the serious study every morning for half an hour, while Papa expounded the Catechism, and then rewarded the catechised with a sweetmeat out of a jar on the mantelpiece, or a joke out of his genial heart. But their mother was their teacher par excellence. In the drawing-room upstairs, in the dark London afternoons, while Papa dozed comfortably in a solid armchair by the fire, she instructed the four small creatures (each seated on a bead footstool by her sofa) in their duty to God and their neighbour, and in the gentle bigotries of her own simple faith; and then, as recreation, read aloud that delicious and impressive classic of the Early-Victorian nursery, 'The Three Bears'; or Papa took two of the audience

(I cannot do with more than two

To give a hand to each ')

to Covent Garden to buy flowers for the party in the evening.

The party in the evening! It is in his sociability, and his sociabilities, in the quantity and the quality of his play as much, or much more, than in the quantity and the quality of his work, that this Parson of the Thirties differed from his brethren of to-day. Amen Corner was a very nest of modest entertainments. Mr. Hall could have been engaged fourteen dinners deep,' like Sterne, had he been so minded. As it was, on many and many an evening he buttoned himself into his great-coat, put his neat roll of songs (Phyllis is My Only Joy,' and 'The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington') under his arm, and trotted across the Churchyard to meet Theodore Hook at Barham's, or slipped into Sydney Smith's residentiary house for the weekly party he always gave when in residence.

.

Sometimes his Reverence would say grace over the turtle' of a City Company for a brother parson-he was not himself Chaplain to any of the Companies-or spend an evening at the newly founded Garrick Club with Barham, who was an original member of the Club, and had written the words of the glee sung

at its opening festival. Sometimes there was a dinner-a massive dinner indeed-at the house of a City parishioner and merchant; and his Reverence and Madam, with her fine Cashmere shawl (the present of a brother-in-law in India) on her slight shoulders, went thither in a hackney coach.

But Madam only rarely accompanied her husband. Her increasing family and her fragile health often prevented her. A story runs how, on a Saturday night, his Reverence, just starting out for a dinner-party, called up the stairs to her to make a diligent search for dry bones in his absence-the Dry Bones being, in fact, the title of a sermon (itself partaking a little of the quality of the bones, perhaps) concerning the Valley of Dry Bones in the thirty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, which his Reverence proposed to preach on the following morning.

Once or twice a week No. 3 Amen Corner had a dinner itself. The picture of the old wood-panelled dining-room, with the wellladen table lit by candles in solid silver candlesticks, with the red curtains cosily drawn about the windows, the fire ablaze, and the good master of the house vastly enjoying himself decanting liberal quantities of his fine old port and brown sherry before the arrival of the guests, is pleasant and not imaginary. When Sydney Smith was one of the diners he would expressly arrive a full ten minutes too soon, run up to the nursery at the top of the house, take a small girl on each knee, and delight to expend on a few little children, and the baby boy crowing for joy of life in a cot in the corner, the inimitable drollery and the stream of irresistible cleverness and nonsense which only the night before, perhaps, had been the pièce de résistance of the dinner at Holland House. One of the little girls still recollects-better even than the sweets in his pocket-the bonhomie and kindness of the shrewd, manly face, and knows, as his own children and intimates knew, that Sydney Smith's wit was not his finest quality.

When he came down to the drawing-room he must often have found Madam-with the filmy scarf over her shoulders, and the brown silk frock of her portrait-talking to a guest who was constantly staying in the house, Edward Harley, the fifth Earl of Oxford and Mortimer.

An old and a very kind friend of Madam's family, the Jeffreys, my Lord had been, not so very long ago, the boon companion of George IV; famous on the turf, where he would ride his own horses, particularly a celebrated mare, Victoria, and as having

made a very youthful and unhappy marriage, and, with his wife, quickly dissipated a great fortune. He had been also the friend of Byron-the Byron student will not have forgotten that it was on Lady Oxford's note-paper the poet wrote the cutting dismissal' to Lady Caroline Lamb, which that impossible person afterwards published, at least in part, in Glenarvon '; while Ianthe,' to whom Byron dedicated 'Childe Harold,' was Lady Charlotte, Lord Oxford's daughter, then a little girl of ten years old, and afterwards Lady Charlotte Bacon.

Now (in 1835, when he made Mr. Hall his chaplain), the Earl was about sixty-two years old-with the lean, rather sardonic face, drooping hook nose, and bright close-set eyes which have been reproduced in his miniature, and had greatly retrenched his fortunes and sobered his life. If his youth had been wild, its faults were between him and his God. Amen Corner had only to remember the most delicate and thoughtful kindness, and that he bore to his chaplain a sincere and lifelong friendship, and to the chaplain's wife the tenderest affection and respect.

Very constantly among the diners was 'Thomas Ingoldsby 'a host in himself; exuberant in his geniality; buoyant, farcical, irrepressible; with a humour and playfulness not unlike Charles Lamb's; an excellent fund of anecdote of his own, and a charming capacity for listening to the much less excellent anecdotes of others.

Here, too, came very frequently another brother minor canon of the host's, a Mr. Bennett, a hot-spirited, adventurous cleric, who had worn the red coat before he donned the black, and had seen service in the Peninsular War under Wellington. His experiences in the fearful storming and sack of Badajos left so terrible an impression on a sensitive mind, that he had not only the greatest dislike to speak of the event, but even to hear a reference made to it.

Another guest, an occasional inmate of No. 3, was Harry White, Madam's nephew, sometime ensign in the 44th Regiment -Lord Oxford having obtained him the commission. Wild, dissipated, engaging, generous, and irresponsible-having, indeed, all the faults which make a man lovable, and none of the severer virtues which make him respectable-his future history outvied many a romance. Having seen service in India, he sold out of the army after an esclandre in which he was certainly not blameless, and entirely squandered an excellent substance in riotous living.

At one time, his minor canon uncle was allowing him his whole means of existence; at his worst, the doors of the house in Amen Corner were never shut in his face. As he passed them, the boy's grosser vices seem to have dropped from him like a mantle. In Madam's drawing-room, and the purity of her presence, the oaths left his lips and the guile his heart. The little girls had never a jollier or a more harmless companion. Then, one day when he was financially at his lowest ebb, Master Harry, being at the Bank of England, finds most dramatically and unexpectedly lying there, as unclaimed dividends, a few hundreds belonging to his father. He bought an outfit for Natal, took a farewell of Amen Corner, which was at once passionately sorrowful for the past and incurably hopeful for the future, and started anew-which, alas ! is seldom of any use without starting a new character. He married abroad, beneath him; fell into the old faults, drink, debt, dissipation, and became at last a common labourer in a brickfield. In October 1863, the Bishop of the Orange Free State recorded in his Journal that he found him digging a well. Drinking had been his ruin. I told him of his uncle's (Mr. Hall's) death; it was touching to see the rough man in tears. He had been brought up by his uncle, and said "He taught me all the good I ever knew "; he seemed to feel his degradation.' The novel 'Flotsam,' by Henry Seton Merriman, is founded on the character and the adventures of Harry White. The last pages of the book, recording his death in the waggon as he was being taken to the missionary station, are literally accurate.

But when Amen Corner gave its little dinners in the thirties, Ensign Harry was at his liveliest and handsomest. Add to the guests already mentioned two or three perfectly amiable and charming young ladies, with curls and an obliging ability to play on the harp after dinner, and the party would be complete at eight or ten persons.

Numerically was, certainly, the only sense in which it was a 'little dinner.' It began by a solid and life-giving soup, which Mr. Hall himself doled out generously from a vast silver tureen, presented to him by his grateful parishioners at St. Bene't's, who had caused an inscription to be engraved on it expressing their sentiments in terms even more handsome than the tureen itself. The feast continued in the substantial manner in which it had begun. As for drinking, the age of excess was everywhere passing, and among this company had certainly passed. But it