other, and preferred boiling its mutton one day and eating it cold the next. Then the bachelor curate, who had a semi-official connection with the new establishment, reading prayers there as “chaplain and visitor,” who was presumed to have a healthy appetite, and was known to have complained of the eternal mutton-chops provided by his landlady, was requested to undergo a series of little dinners cooked for him gratis. The bashful Oxonian found it impossible to resist the lady patronesses’ invitation, and consented—for the good of the institution. But it ended in the loss to the parish of a very excellent working parson. For a few weeks, the experimental ragouts and curries sent in to his lodgings had at least the advantage of being a change: but as the presiding matron gradually struck out a bolder line, and fed him with the more ambitious efforts of her scholars, it became too much even for clerical patience, and he resigned his cure. Out of delicacy to the ladies’ committee, he gave out that it was “the Dissenters;” but all his intimate friends knew that it was the cooking-school. The Rector of Lynmere is a Mr Leslie—a clergyman of the refined and intellectual type, intended, probably, as an artistic contrast to Mr Norris in his cricket flannels. He is, we are expressly told, “an aristocrat”—indeed, a nephew of the Countess aforesaid. He is reserved, nervous, and diffident, although earnest and single-hearted. The vulgar insolence of the Baptists at the vestry-meetings is gall and wormwood to him; and he suffers scarcely less under the fussy interference of a Madam Woodlands, one of the parish notables, of Low-Church views and energetic benevolence, who patronises the church and the rector, and holds him virtually responsible for all the petty offences and indecorums which disturb the propriety of the village. This lady is very slightly sketched, but the outline can be filled up from many a parish clergyman’s mental notebook. We do not wonder that Mr Leslie, with his shrinking sensibilities, had as great a horror of her as of Mr Say, the Nonconformist agitator, who led the attack at the church-rate meetings. Only we would remark, that if the author thinks that the unfitness of the Rector of Lynmere to contend with a body of political Dissenters, or his want of tact in dealing with so very excellent and troublesome a parishioner as Mrs Woodlands, is at all explained by his being “an aristocrat,” he is encouraging them in a very common and very unfortunate mistake. It is true that it is not pleasant for a man of cultivated mind and refined tastes, be he priest or layman, to be brought into contact with opponents whose nature and feelings, and the manner in which they express those feelings, are rude and vulgar; but if he possess, in addition to his refinement and cultivation, good sound sense, a moderate amount of tact, and, above all, good temper, he will find, in the fact of his being “a gentleman,” an immense weight of