distinguished
attraction, occasionally known to draw hearers from the next parish. The
innovation of hymn-books was as yet undreamed of; even the New Version
was regarded with a sort of melancholy tolerance, as part of the common
degeneracy in a time when prices had dwindled, and a cotton gown was no
longer stout enough to last a lifetime; for the lyrical taste of the best
heads in Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins. But the
greatest triumphs of the Shepperton choir were reserved for the Sundays
when the slate announced an ANTHEM, with a dignified abstinence from
particularization, both words and music lying far beyond the reach of the
most ambitious amateur in the congregation: an anthem in which the
key-bugles always ran away at a great pace, while the bassoon every now
and then boomed a flying shot after them.

As for the clergyman, Mr. Gilfil, an excellent old gentleman, who smoked
very long pipes and preached very short sermons, I must not speak of him,
or I might be tempted to tell the story of his life, which had its little
romance, as most lives have between the ages of teetotum and tobacco. And
at present I am concerned with quite another sort of clergyman--the Rev.
Amos Barton, who did not come to Shepperton until long after Mr. Gilfil
had departed this life--until after an interval in which Evangelicalism
and the Catholic Question had begun to agitate the rustic mind with
controversial debates. A Popish blacksmith had produced a strong
Protestant reaction by declaring that, as soon as the Emancipation Bill
was passed, he should do a great stroke of business in gridirons; and the
disinclination of the Shepperton parishioners generally to dim the unique
glory of St Lawrence, rendered the Church and Constitution an affair of
their business and bosoms. A zealous Evangelical preacher had made the
old sounding-board vibrate with quite a different sort of elocution from
Mr. Gilfil's; the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New
Versions; and the great square pews were crowded with new faces from
distant corners of the parish--perhaps from Dissenting chapels.

You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of
Shepperton. He was no such thing. Those were days when a man could hold
three small livings, starve a curate a-piece on two of them, and live
badly himself on the third. It was so with the Vicar of Shepperton; a
vicar given to bricks and mortar, and thereby running into