ting number of bells for a cathedral; three, or two at the least, for a parish church. What the ancient bell-ringers resembled may be seen from a curious carving of one, clad in a cassock, and ringing a bell with each hand, on a Norman font at Belton, Lincolnshire. It is very difficult to tell the exact date of our oldest bells. Those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have invari ably shields, letters, and other devices, from which a tolerably correct guess can be made at the year in which they were cast. Dates were marked on them after 1550, and the practice has since been continued. Mr. Tyssen, a great authority on campanology, supposes a bell at Duncton, Sussex, to be the earliest dated bell in England. It bears the date of 1369, but is of foreign manufacture. Tell a campanologist of a bell with an inscription on it, and he is at once eager to reach it, braving all the dangers of im rate volume on The Church Bells of Devon, to which we are already indebted for several facts. It is worth while translating one or two of these early mottoes. Crowned Virgin, lead us to blessed realms, May the Lord's name be blessed. I will sing Thy praise, O Lord. In the eastern counties of England, where Puritanism most prevailed, is found a curious inscription I sound not for the souls of the dead, but the ears of the living. English mottoes did not come into gene- "God save the church "" I to the grave do summon all, many more. After 1600, bell-mottoes lose, for the most part, their religious tone. They record the parsons and churchwardens' names and the date of casting. Longer inscriptions are often frivolous or irreverent, such as perfect rickety ladders and rotten belfry is on a bell at Southwell Church, and on floors, the wrath of owls and jackdaws at seeing their realms invaded, to say nothing of the certainty of being halfsmothered in dust and cobwebs. One such we remember who fell through the belfry floor, but was luckily caught by two joists under his arms. There he remained suspended-being an elderly man, and fearing lest the joists should also give way if he made strenuous endeavors to extricate himself-till the clerk happened to come into the body of the church, and then ascended to his res cue. Most fortunately, the good man had a habit of carrying his snuff loose in his waistcoat pocket (like the first Napoleon), and was just able to reach it and supply his nose during his unpleasant imprisonment, to which, he used to say, he owed much of his equanimity while suspended. "Jesus bells," as they are called, are far from uncommon. Sir H. Partridge won four such-the greatest of their kind in the kingdom-from Henry VIII. at a single cast of the dice. The oldest bells bear the name of the saint to whom they were dedicated. Then follows the Ora pro nobis of preReformation times, specially common in the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century, succeed short Latin hexameters, or laudatory mottoes. We shall enrich this part of our subject with gatherings from the Rev. H. T. Ellacombe's elabo My sound is good, my shape is neat, At St. Helen's, Worcester, is a set of bells Leonine or rhyming Latin hexameters are frequently found on bells; others are called alphabet bells, from bearing the letters of the alphabet in quaint old types on their rims. Lest these minutia should prove wearisome to any save professed campanologists, we hasten to conclude this paper by culling a few bell-legends at random from Mr. Ellacombe's interesting collection of those to be found on Devon church bells. MORES VESTRA VITA. Squire Arundel the great my whole expense did When you me ring, I'll sweetly sing. I mean to make it understood When I begin, then all strike in. Some generous hearts do me here fix, Come let us sing, Church and King! In London 1, 8, 5 and 1. I toll the funeral knell, I ring the festal day, I mark the fleeting hours, And chime the church to pray. It is worth noticing that in the bells of Ottery St. Mary and St. Martin Exeter, of the date of 1671, are inserted satirical medals, which were not uncommon at that time, representing a pope and a king under one face, a cardinal and bishop on the other. These are a very rare feature in campanology. We can well remember how the souls of good Presbyterians were sore vexed when St. Ninian's was completed at Perth, and "a' day lang the bell was jowling o'er the Inch for prayers, like a mad thing." What a pity that Bishop Grandison, who wrote the statutes for the above-mentioned church of Ottery, could not have revisited the earth, to rectify matters at Perth! We translate a few words of them, as a parting caution to all ardent campanologists: 'Peals are to be rung at funerals according to the dignity of the deceased, on fewer or more bells; but we forbid them to be sounded at too great length, nor again after even-song or early in the morning (as they do at Exeter), because 'sounding brass or the tinkling cymbal ’ profit souls not at all, and do much harm to men's ears, and to the fabric, and to the bells." Leisure Hour. THE NEW ZEALANDER ON LONDON BRIDGE. THERE is an inaccurate reference in Crabb Robinson's "Diary" to a poem of Mrs. Barbauld's, in which she is represented as prophesying that "on some future day a traveller from the Antipodes will, from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge, contemplate the ruins of St. Paul's." The actual passage speaks of wanderers, who "With duteous zeal their pilgrimage shall take, Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way. The famous sentence in Macaulay's Essays will bear repetition after these lines: "She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's." It does not detract from the eloquent force of this language that the same figure in various forms has been frequently used; but there is a curiously close resemblance in one of Walpole's lively letters to Sir H. Mann, where the following sentence occurs: แ At last some curious native of Lima will visit London, and give a sketch of the ruins of Westminster and St. Paul's." The idea is the common property of writers who have moralized on the mutabilities of time. Volney, in his "Ruins of Empires," had written: "Reflecting that if the places before me had once exhibited this animated picture, who, said I to myself, can assure me that their present desolation will not one day be the lot of our own country? Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations-who knows but that he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned, and their greatness changed into an empty name?" Shelley has used a similar illustration, with the fuller imagery of a poet, in the preface to "Peter Bell the Third," which he addresses to Moore "In the firm expectation, that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Westminster Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream; some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells, and the Fudges, and their historians." "And empire seeks another hemisphere. Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks where stood her capitols, and hears "Meanwhile the Arts, in second infancy, Far from the civil world; and sagely sighs, Kirke White has the following pas- And moralizes on the state of man.' sage in his poem on "Time JAMES WATT. JAMES WATT, the Scottish mechanician and engineer, the inventor of the steam-engine, is one of the most illustrious names in the annals of Science; but the circumstances of his career are too generally familiar at the present time to require at our hands more than a brief explanation of the engraving of which he is the subject. He was born at Greenock, Scotland, January 19, 1736, and from his earliest youth showed a remarkable genius for mathematics and mechanical contrivances. At the age of fourteen he constructed an electrical machine for his own use, and at this early age also the power of steam, and the method of applying it to mechanics, began to attract his attention. Arago, in his funeral éloge before the French Academy of Sciences, relates an anecdote of him which probably forms the subject, or at least gave the hint, for our picture. It appears that about this period Watt had an aunt, Miss MuirNEW SERIES-VOL. XII., No. 1. Let worn-out cynics tell us Life's a jest, That if we live we wear gray hairs at last; Till Life has reached the summer of its day; Each year makes captive of some glorious thrall; Truth, knowledge, virtue,-all are ours to gain: JOHN DENNIS. "THE LATEST DECALOGUE." (BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.) "THOU shalt have one God only; who |