finds fault with the sermon every Sunday, says that the organist ought to be ashamed of himself, and offers to back himself for any amount to sing the psalms better than all the children put together.

This reminds us that during the first half of last century, and indeed later in many places, the church choir as we know it did not exist, and the leading of the singing was entrusted to the children of the charity school under the direction of the clerk, a custom which had existed since the seventeenth century.  The chancel was never used for the choir, and the children sat up in the gallery at the west end, on either side of the organ.  In a City church that Dickens attended the choir was limited to two girls.  The organ was so out of order that he could ’hear more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music.’  When the service began he was so depressed that, as he says,

I gave but little heed to our dull manner of ambling through the service; to the brisk clerk’s manner of encouraging us to try a note or two at psalm time; to the gallery congregation’s manner of enjoying a shrill duet, without a notion of time or tune; to the whity-brown man’s manner of shutting the minister into the pulpit, and being very particular with the lock of the door, as if he were a dangerous animal.

Elsewhere he found in the choir gallery an ’exhausted charity school’ of four boys and two girls.  The congregations were small, a state of things which at any rate satisfied Mrs. Lirriper, who had a pew at St. Clement Danes and was ‘partial to the evening service not too crowded.’

In Sunday under Three Heads we have a vivid picture of the state of things at a fashionable church.  Carriages roll up, richly dressed people take their places and inspect each other through their glasses.

    The organ peals forth, the hired singers commence a
    short hymn, and the congregation condescendingly rise,
    stare about them and converse in whispers.

Dickens passes from church to chapel.  Here, he says,

the hymn is sung—­not by paid singers, but by the whole assembly at the loudest pitch of their voices, unaccompanied by any musical instrument, the words being given out, two lines at a time, by the clerk.

It cannot be said that, as far as the music is concerned, either of these descriptions is exaggerated when we remember the time at which they were written (1838).  Very few chapels in London had organs, or indeed instruments of any kind, and there is no doubt that the congregations, as a rule, did sing at the tops of their voices, a proceeding known under the more euphonious title of ‘hearty congregational singing.’

He gives a far more favourable account of the music in the village church.  In the essay just referred to he mentions the fact that he attended a service in a West of England church where the service ’was spoken—­not merely read—­by a grey-headed minister.’