scandalised that so good a man should be buried outside the church, resolved to exhume the bones and bring them in. A golden shrine was prepared, and a day appointed for the removal. But it rained—it rained as if a second deluge was come. A second, a third, and on to forty days it rained, and at the end the deluded monks, with St. Ethelwold at their head, still removed the bones, not taking the hint, and moreover made of poor Swithun a sort of weather-vane. So arose the popular rhyme :

"St. Swithun's day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain ;

St. Swithun's day, if thou be faire,
For forty days 'twill rain nae maire."

By the inscription on Shakespeare's tombstone the great dramatic poet is made to say, somewhat profanely

"Cursed be he that moves my bones."

And whether St. Swithun would have shared that sentiment or not, he would be indeed amazed to find himself installed as a ruler of the weather. Where are the bones of the poor saint now? They were twice moved, and when Henry VIII seized the shrine and melted it down into ready money; the little heap of dust was probably swept away unnoticed.

Leaving the patron saint,-King Alfred, his great pupil, did not neglect to improve the Church, but the sturdy Bishop Walkelin in the eleventh century has the honour of having built the Norman Cathedral. He was a man of large ideas and energetic resolution. When about one-third through with his work, he was much straitened by want of timber. He met William the Conqueror out hunting, and prayed his help. The ruthless invader was in a good humour, gave him as much timber from the wood of Hanepinges as he could cut and carry in three days. Here was his chance. Walkelin wild with joy, rushes into the city, collects all the woodmen in the district, and within three days cuts and carries home every tree in the forest. The King soon after riding that way, exclaims-"Have my eyes deceived me? Have I lost my senses? Where is the wood of Hanepinges? When he learned the facts he was furious, till his attendants reminded him of his promise, and re-called the single-eyed piety of the Bishop, whom he at last forgave. Walkelin's tower came down with a crash some fifty years afterwards, but the work of building and re-building went on at irregular intervals, until in the fourteenth century, transformed and completed by William of Wykeham, the Cathedral first appeared much as it now stands.

As one walks towards the choir, admiring the fine stalls of Norwegian oak, upwards of 500 years old, and charmed by the lofty stone reredos, with its canopied niches and pinnacles, what a crowd of thoughts press upon the mind! On this spot was Egbert, the first King of England crowned a thousand years ago. Next came the greater Alfred, and now in the procession of events we see Canute with his Danish Vikings, coming in lowly guise from Southampton where he had rebuked them for their adulation; and placing his royal crown on the high altar of the

Cathedral as an offering to Almighty God, the veritable ruler of the waves. Twenty years later an awful scene took place. Emma, mother of Edward the Confessor, after spending the night in prayer, walked down the nave of the Cathedral barefoot over nine red-hot plough shares, amidst an immense concourse, without sustaining injury, thus satisfying the world of her innocence of the murder of her own son.

Greater days were in store for the Cathedral when William the Conqueror was crowned in it a second time as King of England, in 1069. This was followed by the coronations of a long line of kings, and by other great ceremonies, among the most magnificent being the marriage of Henry IV. with Joan of Brittany, and the ill-fated union of Queen Mary with Philip of Spain. But never was it more honoured than in the days of its proud and wealthy Bishop, Beaufort, before whose tomb we are now standing. As we look at the cold marble, the face of a perfect autocrat, one of polished manners and haughty resolution, we recal the Lord Protector to King Henry VI., the man who lost us France and sowed the seeds of the Wars of the Roses. The monument -a very fine one, but not equal in purity of treatment to that of William of Wykeham-is enclosed in one of the most beautiful chantries in England. On the head of the Bishop is the Cardinal's hat, which recalls Exeter's exclamation in Henry VI.*

"What? Is my Lord of Winchester installed,
And called unto a Cardinal's degree?
Then I perceive that will be verified,
Henry the Fifth did sometime prophesy;
'If once he comes to be a Cardinal,

He'll make his cap co-equal with the crown."

As I gaze upon the gorgeous sepulchre still aglow with colour, my mind. again reverts to Shakespeare's awful account of the death-bed scene of Beaufort, where he is striving to buy peace with wealth, and in his last mutterings seems to see the ghost of the "good Duke Humphrey," whose death he was believed to have caused. King Henry addresses him, in terms which have become household words :

"Lord Cardinal, if thou thinkest on heaven's bliss,
Hold up thy hand, make signal of thy hope.

He dies and makes no sign! O! God forgive him.
(Earl of Warwick) So bad a death argues a monstrous life.
(King Henry) Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all,

Close up his eyes, and draw the curtains close,
And let us all to meditation."

The service was about to begin. I took a seat in the stalls, followed the short but impressive form of morning devotion; then the choir burst forth with that most impassioned chant of Mendelssohn, "Hear my prayer." The long wail of anguish, the struggles of the soul in tribulation, seeming to wrestle almost despairingly with its woes, rose in mighty chords of strife that rolled and met in conflict in mid air. But the exquisite plaintive solo, "O that I had wings like a dove," came forth with angel sweetness at the close, wandering amid the lofty arches like the voice of a liberated soul.

*First part King Henry VI., Act v., Scene 2.

I can only refer to one impression more. The Lady Chapel should be visited, and as it struck me, not so much by its beauty, and the special excellence of its wood carving, as by its reflection of the theology of the period, I must mention it. It is a comfort to me that Wykeham is not responsible for the wall-paintings of miracles of the blessed Virgin which still disfigure the walls. They were painted about 1480, and they show how lovely architecture may enclose an evil religious system, as a beautiful body may enshrine a mean and impure soul. Certainly at this time the ideas of the monks, as expressed for the benefit of the unlearned, must have reached their lowest point of degradation. These miracles are either fantastic, or otherwise they cut at the root of all morality. Take No. 10. A monk, whom, an inscription explains, had led an immoral life, is drowning, and two evil spirits, with instruments of torture, seize him, and are about to carry him off, when the Virgin appears and rescues him. Why? Because he has said masses in her honour! Again, No. 15, a thief who had venerated the Virgin, is delivered by her from the gallows, and No. 19, by praying to the same lady, a robber-knight, is at once delivered from the clutches of the devil. A new and startling idolatry, however, is shown in No. 13, where, the priest being unable to say mass before the Lady Mother, we see Christ Himself, with saints and angels, officiating in his stead. Could Mariolatry any further go? Some of these strange outlines show how the feelings of the times ran in them. One (No. 11) evidently produced during war with France, shows two Brabançons being seized by devils and killed for throwing stones at an image of the Virgin. We often hear that the devil is not so black as he is painted, but the monks thought otherwise, and the most ludicrous wall decoration is No. 17. The Virgin assisting a painter to paint the devil as ugly as he knew him to be, in spite of all the devil can do to stop him. The devil is, perhaps unconsciously, posing for his portrait.

The three hours I claimed for my visit have more than elapsed and I must quit these walls within which the whole humanity of the past slowly rises up before me. With hardly more than a glance at Chantrey's beautiful monument to Bishop North-a mere look at the floor slab where the remains of dear old Izaak Walton were buried; and at two finely treated wall monuments by Flaxman, one to Henrietta North, the other to the poet Warton, I unwillingly retire, thanking the intelligent guide, who had made a loving study of the edifice, and who moreover refused the proffered fee-(suggesting the box for the restoration fund). I emerge into the open air, with a conviction that if I can spend thrice three hours in the Cathedral again, I shall still find more to learn, to reverence, and to admire.

I thought I had done, but even on the short road to dinner an incident stops me. There was the house where the beloved Bishop (then the Prebendary) Ken lived. He was a Wykehamist. I saw afterwards where the boy had carved his name in the College Cloisters, "Tom Ken, 1646." He made his mark on English history afterwards. When Charles II came to Winchester he asked Ken to give Nell

Gwynne rooms in his house. The daring Prebendary declined. Charles II. seems to have had some conscience, for when, a few years later the Bishopric of Bath and Wells became vacant, the King asked "Where is the good little man who refused his lodgings to poor Nell." He then made him bishop. Ken approved his decision by his noble working; and when, in the next reign, the seven Bishops went to the Tower for refusing to read the Declaration of Indulgence, Ken was the spokesman among them. When he appeared before James II. he said, "Sire, I hope you will give that liberty to us which you allow to all mankind." The trial of the seven Bishops is a turning point in English history. Although Ken had afterwards to vacate his bishopric for loyalty to the very monarch he had opposed; his was a sweet old age. The noble words of his morning and evening hymns are daily sung by tens of thousands of English men and women, while many other glorious songs of praise came forth from the study of the stout old man as the evening shadows closed around his last retirement.

JOT.

(To be continued.)

BUNYAN.

THERE are some books which seem to carry with them the charm of perennial youth; generations have passed away since they were first given to the world, yet the hold which they possess upon the hearts of men has been strengthened as the years have rolled on. Our grandfathers pored over their pages in their boyhood, but the genius which captivated them has not lost its fascination now. The world is growing old, and the fashions of yesterday are already out of date, yet the old books have lost none of their charm: the freshness and bloom of their youth have never faded.

We ourselves, when children, read them with glowing hearts and with unquestioning faith: their heroes and heroines were all real to us, and "their loves and their distresses" obtained our eager sympathy. How we enjoyed the stir and bustle of the life they pourtrayed; what visions they gave us of adventures, such as might yet be in store for us; and what matter if sometimes the page was wet with tears, we could still see dimly the good time coming, for had we not stealthily peeped at the last page and seen how glorious was the issue-how rose-coloured the ending.

And now, when life has sterner pictures to show us, harsher realities to comfort us with, when our step is not so eager, nor our blood so hot as once it was, we re-open our favourite books and find in their pages a charm we can discover nowhere else. They awaken the thoughts and recall the associations of our lost youth; we recognise in their characters old friends who have survived the thousand shocks and changes of

time, who have remained young while we have been growing old, who are still the same as when we first knew them, and have still the same power to captivate our imaginations and possess our hearts.

To use the felicitous language of Mr. Dale: "We open our books and vanished years return. 'Time has run back and fetched the age of gold.' We knew old Lear when we were boys, he is no older now. Most of the young men and maidens, whose love passages entertained us when we ourselves were young, are old married people, and occasionally wrangle over the expenses of housekeeping, but Romeo and Juliet are courting still:

'For ever he will love, and she be fair.'"

The Pilgrim's Progress is undoubtedly one of the books which possess this charm of which we have been speaking. Who has not read it, and reading it, has not been fascinated by its powerful spell? It is one of our oldest and dearest friends: dear to us in the nursery, and dearer still to us now. We cannot tell how many times we have seen Christian set out from the City of Destruction, how often we have watched him pass through the Wicket-gate, or climb the hill Difficulty; it would puzzle us to say how frequently we have gazed with re-awakening interest at the wonders of the Interpreter's House, or watched, with breathless anxiety, the Pilgrim's combat with Apollyon.

I suppose no child ever read the wonderful story without believing it most implicitly; for the marvellous genius of the author has so invested the creations of his fertile imagination with reality and life, that we follow their adventures with an interest as intense, and with a sympathy as keen, as are excited by the perils and misfortunes of historical characters, and to the child they become actual verities. "This," says Macaulay, "is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were; that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another." And that this is no exaggeration, every reader of the book will admit. The characters are so real and life-like that we instinctively regard them as actual men and women, and have our special favourites amongst them. Mr. Great-heart is to us as much a real character as any of those grand old Puritan captains, from one of whom Bunyan probably sketched the likeness, who were equally ready to lead a prayer meeting or a troop of soldiers, who would expound the Scriptures at one moment and go forth to slay "the foes of the Lord" at the next. Lord Hate-good is as vivid and life-like to us as Judge Jefferies himself; Mr. Feeblemind and Mrs. Timorous, Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Madam Bubble, Mr. Standfast and Giant Despair, are not abstract qualities-they are absolute realities. So, also, it is with the road the Pilgrims travel, all its features live in our memories as familiar scenes that will never be forgotten. From the Slough of Despond to the pleasant land of Beulah, "there is no ascent, no declivity, no resting-place, no turn-stile with which we are not perfectly acquainted."

And as we close the book what a flood of memories crowd upon our thoughts, what numberless scenes and associations the little volume