ring of earnestness in it; and his delivery is accompanied with a tolerable amount of activity.  If he were a little more buoyant, if he could put on a less learned and more cheerful look, and would not got so very grave in his style, he would be better relished.  Polemically, he has done fair service for the denomination to which he belongs—­done it sometimes in spite of Lily, and Linacre, and their descendants; and if he is not immaculate, he has at least the satisfaction of knowing that nobody else is, and never will be until they reach the real New Jerusalem.

TRINITY CHURCH.

In a part of the town pre-eminently dim, intricate, and populous stands “The Church of the Holy Trinity.”  Father Time and the smoke of twice five hundred chimneys have darkened its fabric, and transmuted its chiselled stone walls into a dull pile of masonry.  But it is a beautiful church for all that.  If the exterior has been carbonised and begrimed, the interior has enjoyed a charmed life, and is apparently as young today as it was on “Friday, the eighth of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifteen,” when “George H. Chester” consecrated the building and all thereunto belonging.  The first stone of this church was laid on the 4th of June, 1814—­the natal anniversary of George III—­by Sir Henry Philip Hoghton, of Hoghton, the lay rector and patron of the parish of Preston.  Under that first stone there were deposited a number of coins, two scrolls, and one newspaper—­the Preston Chronicle.  The first minister of Trinity Church was the Rev. Edward Law, a gentleman, who, according to a local historian, “ably defended the belief of the adorable Trinity in a series of letters, assisted by the Rev. R. Baxter, of Stonyhurst, against a Unitarian minister, the Rev. T. C. Holland, which appeared in the Preston Chronicle,” and were subsequently reprinted and sold for the enlightenment and mystification of all polemically-minded men.  Trinity Church is built on a plot of ground once called Patten Field.  Moderns know little, if anything, of that field; but Patten-street—­a delicious thoroughfare proximately fronting the church—­still remains as a lingering topographical reminder of olden days.  There were few houses in the region of Patten Field when Trinity Church was built:  pastures were its colleagues, and patches of greensward its regular companions.  But things have changed since then, and a mile of houses, stretching northward, and westward, and eastward now fills up the ancient hiatus.  Trinity Church cost 9,080 pounds 9s. 3d., and that sum was raised partly by subscriptions and donations and partly by the sale of pews.  Who gave the ultimate threepence we cannot tell, neither are we told in what way it was expended.