C’est M. John ATWOOD.SLATER qui avait visite notre cite, il y a quelques annees, il avait alors dessine une belle perspective de Sainte-Cecile qu’il a exposee a l’Academie Royale de Londres.  Il a admire la plupart des cathedrales gothiques de notre pays et, en fin connaisseur, il nous informe que nous possedons un des plus recherches specimens d’architecture qui existent en France.  Quelques-unes de ces cathedrales sont a peine plus merveilleuses, mais il n’en est guere qui se pretent favorablement comme elle a l’esprit tranquille de devotion.

Maintenant pour le profit de ceux a qui cela pourrait faire plaisir M. John ATWOOD.SLATER, cet artist nous communique benevolement ce renseignegnement tres special:  Il est encore fort nageur!  C’est lui qui aux dates de 22, 28 et 29 aout a ete signale par la Normandie pour avoir fait a la nage le tour du Mont St. Michel:  ce que personne jusqu’ici n’avait ose pretendre faire a cause des marees qui sont toujours tres contraires.—­J.A.S.

UNPUBLISHED LETTERS.

MUSIC.

To the Editor of The Times, London.

Sir,—­Whilst admitting the all-importance and the austere role of circumstance weighted with interest, and fused to an all-volatile point sufficient to write to you concerning, and always entering, freed from schism, the moot point, I beg leave to advance the suggestion that (with correct apposition of sentiment, already said) the moment has arrived for an improvement to be effected in the Hymnal, in the public offices of St. Paul’s Cathedral employed.

For the furtherance of this important item of diocesan and divine service, “Hymns, Ancient and Modern,” be it well known, has stood the crucial test of a number of years; while its mechanical characteristics have been demonstrated all the way along the metronome number of decades it has served to mollify and assuage the griefs and passions, and inspire the consciences of congregations using it habitually as a vade mecum.

While believing in the sedate grandeur of its stereotyped orthodoxy, I powerfully plead, and in a tone of restraint, this prerogative:  that the edition of hymns known as “The Hymnary,” should upon examination be found to contain more agreeable, versatile value and fecundity of literary nutrition:  honourably and scholastically capable of out-classing the rival for whose displacement I plead; and competent at once to put yet better light with wholesomer sustenance and rarer spiritual food into the minds of its privileged students.