worthy of the attentive perusal of the country clergy.  Its purpose is to furnish practical suggestions for the maintenance of decent propriety about the church and churchyard.  I am not, at present, concerned with that part of the tract which relates to churches; but I may remark, in passing, that Mr. Hill’s views upon that subject appear to me distinguished by great good sense, moderation, and taste.  He does not discourage country clergymen, who have but limited means with which to set about ordering and beautifying their churches, by suggesting arrangements on too grand and expensive a scale:  on the contrary, he enters with hearty sympathy into all plans for attaining a simple and inexpensive seemliness where more cannot be accomplished.  And I think he hits with remarkable felicity the just mean between an undue and excessive regard to the mere externalities of worship, and a puritanical bareness and contempt for material aids, desiring, in the words of Archbishop Bramhall, that ’all be with due moderation, so as neither to render religion sordid and sluttish, nor yet light and garish, but comely and venerable.’

Equally judicious, and equally practical, are Mr. Hill’s hints as to the ordering of churchyards.  He laments that churchyards should ever be found where long, rank grass, briers, and nettles abound, and where neatly kept walks and graves are wanting.  He goes on:—­

And yet, how trifling an amount of care and attention would suffice to render neat, pretty, and pleasant to look upon, that which has oftentimes an unpleasing, desolate, and painful aspect.  A few sheep occasionally (or better still, the scythe and shears now and then employed), with a trifling attention to the walks, once properly formed and gravelled, will suffice, when the fences are duly kept, to make any churchyard seemly and neat:  a little more than this will make it ornamental and instructive.

It is possible that many persons might feel that flower-beds and shrubberies are not what they would wish to see in a churchyard; they might think they gave too garden-like and adorned a look to so solemn and sacred a spot; persons will not all think alike on such a matter:  and yet something may be done in this direction with an effect which would please everybody.  A few trees of the arbor vitae, the cypress, and the Irish yew, scattered here and there, with tirs in the hedge-rows or boundary fences, would be unobjectionable; while wooden baskets, or boxes, placed by the sides of the walks, and filled in summer with the fuchsia or scarlet geranium, would give our churchyards an exceedingly pretty, and perhaps not unsuitable appearance.  Little clumps of snowdrops and primroses might also be planted here and there; for flowers may fitly spring up, bloom, and fade away, in a spot which so impressively tells us of death and resurrection:  and where sheep even are never admitted, all these methods for beautifying a churchyard may be adopted.  Shrubs and flowers on and near the graves, as is so universal in Wales; independently of their pretty effect, show a kindly feeling for the memory of those whose bodies rest beneath them; and how far to be preferred to those enormous and frightful masses of brick or stone which the country mason has, alas, so plentifully supplied!