CHAPTER XIII.

Birmingham; incessant clamour of the place-Toy-shop of Britain; serious character of the games in which its toys are chiefly employed-Museum-Liberality of the scientific English-Musical genius of Birmingham-Theory-Controversy with the Yorkers -Anecdote The English language spoken very variously by the English; in most cases spoken very ill-English type of person-Attend a Puseyite chapel-Puseyism a feeble imitation of Popery-Popish cathedral-Popery the true resting-place of the Puseyite Sketch of the rise and progress of the Puseyite principle; its purposed object not attained; hostility to science-English funerals.

THE sun had set ere I entered Birmingham through a long low suburb, in which all the houses seemed to have been built during the last twenty years. Particularly tame-looking houses they are; and I had begun to lower my expectations to the level of a flat, mediocre, three-mile city of brick-a sort of manufactory in general, with offices attached-when the coach drove up through New Street, and I caught a glimpse of the Town Hall, a noble building of Anglesea marble, of which Athens in its best days might not have been ashamed. The whole street is a fine one. I saw the lamps lighting up under a stately new edifice the Grammar School of King Edward the Sixth, which, like most recent erections of any pretension, either in England or among ourselves, bears the mediæval stamp : still farther on I could descry, through the darkening twilight, a Roman-looking building that rises over the market-place; and so I inferred that the humble brick of Birmingham, singularly abundant, doubtless, and widely spread, represents merely the business necessities of the place; and that, when on any occasion its taste comes to be displayed, it proves to be a not

What first

worse taste than that shown by its neighbours. struck my ear as peculiar among the noises of a large town— and their amount here is singularly great-was what seemed to be somewhat irregular platoon firing, carried on, volley after volley, with the most persistent deliberation. The sounds came, I was told, from the "proofing-house”—an iron-lined building, in which the gun-smith tests his musket-barrels, by giving them a quadruple charge of powder and ball, and then, after ranging them in a row, firing them from outside the apartment by means of a train. Birmingham produces on the average a musket per minute, night and day, throughout the year: it, besides, furnishes the army with its swords, the navy with its cutlasses and pistols, and the busy writers of the day with their steel pens by the hundredweight and the ton; and thus it labours to deserve its name of the "Great Toy-shop of Britain," by fashioning toys in abundance for the two most serious games of the day-the game of war and the game of opinion-making.

On the morrow I visited several points of interest connected with the place and its vicinity. I found at the New Cemetery, on the north-western side of the town, where a party of Irish labourers were engaged in cutting deep into the hill-side, a good section, for about forty feet, of the Lower New Red Sandstone; but its only organisms-carbonized leaves and stems, by much too obscure for recognition-told no distinct story; and so incoherent is the enclosing sandstone matrix, that the labourers dug into it with their mattocks as if it were a bank of clay. I glanced over the Geological Museum attached to the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, and found it, though small, beautifully kept and scientifically arranged. It has its few specimens of New Red Sandstone fossils, chiefly Posidonomya, from the upper sandstone band which overlies. the saliferous marls; but their presence in a middle place here, between the numerous fossils of the Carboniferous and Oolitic systems, serves but to show the great poverty in organic

remains of the intermediate system, as developed in England. Though of course wholly a stranger, I found free admission to both the Dudley and Birmingham Museums, and experienced, with but few exceptions, a similar liberality in my visits to all the other local collections of England which fell in my way. We have still great room for improvement in this respect in Scotland. We are far behind at least the laymen of England— its liberal mechanicians and manufacturers, and its cultivators of science and the arts-in the generosity with which they throw open their collections; and resemble rather that portion of the English clergy who make good livings better by exhibiting their consecrated places-not too holy, it would seem, to be converted into show-boxes-for paltry twopences and groats. I know not a museum in Edinburgh or Glasgow, save that of the Highland Society, to which a stranger can get access at once so ready and so free as that which I obtained, in the course of my tour, to the Newcastle, Dudley, Birmingham, and British Museums.

Almost all the larger towns of England manifest some one leading taste or other. Some are peculiarly literary, some decidedly scientific; and the taste paramount in Birmingham seems to be a taste for music. In no town in the world are the mechanical arts more noisy: hammer rings incessantly on anvil; there is an unending clang of metal, an unceasing clank of engines; flame rustles, water hisses, steam roars, and from time to time, hoarse and hollow over all, rises the thunder of the proofing-house. The people live in an atmosphere continually vibrating with clamour; and it would seem as if their amusements had caught the general tone, and become noisy like their avocations. The man who for years has slept soundly night after night in the neighbourhood of a foundry, awakens disturbed if by some accident the hammering ceases the imprisoned linnet or thrush is excited to emulation by even the screeching of a knife-grinder's wheel or the din of a copper

smith's shop, and pours out its soul in music. It seems not very improbable that the two principles on which these phenomena hinge-principles as diverse as the phenomena themselves may have been influential in inducing the peculiar characteristic of Birmingham; that the noises of the place, grown a part of customary existence to its people—inwrought, as it were, into the very staple of their lives-exerts over them some such unmarked influence as that exerted on the sleeper by the foundry; and that, when they relax from their labours, they seek to fill up the void by modulated noises, first caught up, like the song of the bird beside the cutler's wheel or coppersmith's shop, in unconscious rivalry of the clang of their hammers and engines. Be the truth of the theory what it may, there can be little doubt regarding the fact on which it hinges. No town of its size in the empire spends more time and money in concerts and musical festivals than Birmingham; no small proportion of its people are amateur performers; almost all are musical critics; and the organ in its great hall, the property of the town, is, with scarce the exception of that of York, the largest in the empire, and the finest, it is said, without any exception. But on this last point there hangs a keen controversy.

The Yorkers contend that their organ is both the greater and the finer organ of the two; whereas the Birminghamers assert, on the contrary, that theirs, though it may not measure more, plays vastly better. "It is impossible," retort the Yorkers, "that it can play even equally well; nay, were it even as large and as fine an organ-which it is not-it would be inferior by a half and more, unless to an instrument such as ours you could add a Minster such as ours also." "Ah," rejoin the Birminghamers, "fair play! organ to organ: you are coming Yorkshire over us now: the building ́is not in the case at issue. You are surely conscious your instrument, singlehanded, is no match for ours, or you would never deem it

necessary to back it in this style by so imposing an auxiliary." But the argument of the York controversialists I must give in their own words:- "It is worse than idle in the Birmingham people," say the authors of the "Guide to York Minster," "to boast of their organ being unrivalled: we will by and by show how much it falls short of the York organ in actual size. But even were their instrument a fac-simile of ours, it would not avail in a comparison; for it would still lack the building, which, in the case of our magnificent cathedral, is the better half of the organ after all. In this, old Ebor stands unrivalled among all competitors in this kingdom. Even in the noble cathedrals that are dispersed through the country, no equal can be found to York Minster in dimensions, general proportions, grandeur of effect to the eye, and the sublimity and mellowness which it imparts to sound. building requires an instrument of vast power to fill it with sound; but when it is filled, as with its magnificent organ it now is, the effect is grand and affecting in the highest degree; and yet there are in this organ many solo stops of such beautifully vocal, soft, and varied qualities of tone, as actually to require (as they fascinatingly claim) the closest attention of the listener. We beg it to be clearly understood that we have not the slightest intention of depreciating the real merits of the Birmingham organ, as it is confessedly a very complete and splendid instrument; but when we notice such unscrupulous violations of truth as have been so widely disseminated, we deem it a duty incumbent upon us to set the public right.”

It is true, indeed, that such a

That I might be the better able to take an intelligent part in so interesting a controversy-a controversy in which, considering the importance of the point at issue, it is really no wonder though people should lose temper—I attended a musical meeting in the Town Hall, and heard the great organ. The rooma very large one—was well filled, and yet the organ was the sole performer; for so musical is the community, that night after