ill see, that John has sent
home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to
intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on
her giddiness and love of finery.

The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by
the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office
which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails
tittle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour
for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version
of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to
whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic
relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the
neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture
of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all
sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good
deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.

But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate
question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The
parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the
parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of
the Church reformer is generally for the substitution of some
constitutional system, some congregational council, some lay
co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the
narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the
old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of
a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the
observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire,
by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of
"Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and
downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the
censorship of the District Visitor. What the assembly of his "elders" is
to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English
clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his
alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His
selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor
people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to
report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in fa