and priests, like our ecclesiastical architecture and general church management, do not seem to have improved upon their ancestors.  Priests are not as jolly as they once were.  In olden days “holy fathers” could wear horse-hair shirts and scarify their epidermis with a finer cruelty than their modern successors, and they could, after all that, make the blithest songs, sing the merriest melodies, and quaff the oldest port with an air of jocund conscientiousness, making one slyly like them, however much inclined to dispute the correctness of their theology.  And the parsons of the past were also a blithesome set of individuals.  They were perhaps rougher than those mild and refined gentlemen who preach now-a-days; but they were straightforward, thorough, absolutely English, well educated, and stronger in the brain than many of them.  In each Episcopalian, Catholic, and Dissenting community there are new some most erudite, most useful men; but if we take the great multitude of them, and compare their circumstances—­their facilities for education, the varied channels of usefulness they have—­with those of their predecessors, it will be found that the latter were the cleverer, often the wiser, and always the merrier men.  Plainness, erudition, blithesomeness, were their characteristics.  Aye, look at our modern men given up largely to threnody-chiming and to polishing off tea and muffin with elderly females, and compare them, say, for instance, with—­

The poet Praed’s immortal Vicar,
Who wisely wore the cleric gown,
Sound in theology and liquor;
Quite human, though a true divine,
His fellow-men he would not libel;
He gave his friends good honest wine,
And drew his doctrine from the Bible.

Institute a comparison, and then you will say that whilst modern men may be very aesthetic and neatly dressed, the ancient apostolic successors, though less refined, had much more metal in them, were more kindly, genial; and told their followers to live well, to eat well, and to mind none of the hair-splitting neological folly which is now cracking up Christendom.  In old times the Lord did not “call” so many parsons from one church to another as it is said He does now; in the days which have passed the bulk of subordinate parsons did not feel a sort of conscientious hankering every three years for an “enlarged sphere of usefulness,” where the salary was proportionately increased.  We have known multitudes of parsons, in our time, who have been “called” to places where their salaries were increased; we know of but few who have gravitated to a church where the salary was less than the one left.  “Business” enters largely into the conceptions of clergymen.  As a rule, no teachers of religion, except Catholic priests and Methodist ministers, leave one place for another where less of this world’s goods and chattels predominate; and they are compelled to do so, else the result might be different.  When a priest gets his mittimus he has to budge; it