eye. The Anglican
Church is more dignified now than she was in the days of the Georges,
and very rightly, too, since God's ministers should not be the poorest
or meanest of men.

Naturally, as the host was clerical and the building ecclesiastical, the
clergy predominated at this entertainment. The bishop and the dean were
the only prelates of their rank present, but there were archdeacons,
and canons and rectors, and a plentiful supply of curates, all, in their
own opinion, bishops in embryo. The shape and expression of the many
faces were various--ascetic, worldly, pale, red, round, thin, fat, oval;
each one revealed the character of its owner. Some lean, bent forms were
those of men filled with the fire of religion for its own sake; others,
stout, jolly gentlemen in comfortable livings, loved the loaves and
fishes of the Church as much as her precepts. The descendants of Friar
Tuck and the Vicar of Bray were here, as well as those who would have
been Wycliffes and Latimers had the fires of Smithfield still been
alight. Obsequious curates bowed down to pompous prebendaries; bluff
rectors chatted on cordial terms with suave archdeacons; and in the fold
of the Church there were no black sheep on this great occasion. The
shepherds and pastors of the Beorminster flock were polite,
entertaining, amusing, and not too masterful, so that the general air
was quite arcadian.

The laity also formed a strong force. There were lords magnificently
condescending to commoners; M.P.s who talked politics, and M.P.s who had
had enough of that sort of thing at St Stephen's and didn't; hearty
squires from adjacent county seats; prim bankers, with whom the said
squires were anxious to be on good terms, since they were the priests of
Mammon; officers from near garrison towns, gay and lighthearted, who
devoted themselves to the fairer portion of the company; and a
sprinkling of barristers, literary men, hardy explorers, and such like
minnows among Tritons. Last, but not least, the Mayor of Beorminster was
present and posed as a modern Whittington--half commercial wealth, half
municipal dignity. If some envious Anarchist had exploded a dynamite
bomb in the vicinity of the palace on that night, the greatest, the most
intellectual, the richest people of the county would have come to an
untimely end, and then the realm of England, like the people themselves,
would have gone to pieces. The _Beorminster Chronicle_ reporter--also
present with a fl