“Our toils, my friend, are crown’d with sure success: 
  The greater part perform’d, achieve the less.”

* * * * *

DORCHESTER.

(For the Mirror.)

St. Peter’s church, Dorchester, is a handsome structure.  There is a traditional rhyme about it which imports the founder of this church to have been Geoffery Van.

  “Geoffery Van
   With his wife Anne
   And his maid Nan
   Built this church.”

But there was long since dug up in a garden here a large seal, with indisputable marks of antiquity, and this inscription:—­“Sigillum Galfridi de Ann.”  It is therefore supposed, with some reason, that the founder’s name was Ann.

A great number and variety of Roman coins have been dug up in this town, some of silver, others of copper, called by the common people, King Dorn’s Pence; for they have a notion that one king Dorn was the founder of Dorchester.

HALBERT H.

* * * * *

FIRE AT YORK CATHEDRAL.

(For the Mirror.)

  Ut Rosa flos florum
  Sic est domus ista domorum.

Such was the encomium bestowed on the venerable pile of York Minster by an old monkish writer; but, alas! what a change is there in the space of a few short hours; what a scene of desolation, what a lesson of the instability of sublunary things and the vanity of human grandeur!  The glory of the city of York, of England, yea, almost of Europe, is now, through the fanaticism of a modern Erostratus, rendered comparatively a pile of ruin; but still

  “Looks great in ruin, noble in decay.”

This is the third time that this magnificent structure has been assailed by fire; twice it has been totally destroyed; but, like another phoenix, it has again risen from its ashes in a greater degree of splendour.  A period of nearly seven hundred years has now elapsed since the last of these occurrences; and the present fabric has but now narrowly escaped sharing the fate of its predecessors.

The damage which the Minster has sustained is not, perhaps, of so great a magnitude as, from the first appearance of the fire, might have been anticipated.  The destruction is principally confined to the choir, the roof of which is entirely consumed.  The beautiful and elaborately carved screen,[1] which divides the choir from the nave, and forms a support for the organ-loft, has escaped in a most wonderful manner, a few of the more projecting ornaments being merely detached.  The organ, an instrument scarcely equalled in tone by any other in Europe, is totally destroyed.  The oaken stalls,[2] together with their richly carved canopies, have likewise perished.  The altar table, which stood at the eastern end of the choir, on a raised pavement, ascended by a flight of fifteen steps, is