No wonder the clerk was indignant. His musical
autocracy had been overthrown. At one church--Swanscombe, Kent--when, in
1854, the change had taken place, and a kind lady, Miss F----, had
consented to play the new harmonium, the clerk, village cobbler and
leader of parish orchestra, gave out the hymn in his accustomed fashion,
and then, with consummate scorn, bellowed out, "Now, then, Miss F----,
strike up!"
It would have been a far wiser policy to have reformed the old village
orchestra, to have taught the rustic musicians to play better, than to
have silenced them for ever and substituted the "grinstun" instrument.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE CHOIR]
Archbishop Tait once said that there is no one who does not look back
with a kind of shame to the sort of sermons which were preached, the
sort of clergymen who preached them, the sort of building in which they
preached them, and the sort of psalmody with which the service was
ushered in. The late Mr. Beresford Hope thus describes the kind of
service that went on in the time of George IV in a market town of Surrey
not far from London. It was a handsome Gothic church, the chancel being
cut off from the nave by a solid partition covered with verses and
strange paintings, among which Moses and Aaron show in peculiar
uncouthness. The aisles were filled with family pews or private boxes,
raised aloft, and approached by private doors and staircases.
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