such as Browning’s Bishop loved to taste, would have evicted the cheiroptera. Fear of the Archdeacon might have held the Rector’s hand when Divine Service was toward, but I suspect he would still have six week-days undisturbed. This was not the only instance of want of practical common-sense in the management of the freehold. Another incumbent remarked to me that he couldn’t understand why his people didn’t come to church. I thought it might be that his preaching was deterrent, but politeness suggested “the singing?” “Oh no; it isn’t the singing: there’s plenty of that. To be sure,” he added pensively, as if the thought came to him for the first time, “it may be that it is because there is no heating apparatus.” That is one of the drawbacks of official life. You cannot tell a school manager what you really think of him. If his church had been a school, we should have taken a tenth off his grant after a year’s warning; and the next year, if his school was still uninhabitable, we should have struck it off the list. No doubt in Norfolk, as elsewhere, a great change has come over the country clergy. Most of the valuable livings in that diocese were in the gift of the Cambridge colleges, and probably at Cambridge, as at Oxford, clerical fellows hung about the combination rooms for years, either giving indifferent lectures, or, in the preferable alternative, merely consuming the college port; while they waited for the shoes of richly beneficed incumbents, who showed an indecent reluctance to put them off. It was often discovered, when the long-deferred inheritance fell in, that there was lurking in the background a virgin, who had but too often passed the flower of her youth, and who thus tardily became Rectoress Consort. A strange couple they would be to administer the affairs of a country parish. But though too often hampered by lack of training, and sometimes by lack of zeal, in their ecclesiastical duties, they did much for education. The traditions of a college living required, long before the Act of 1870, that there should be a parochial school, and they built generously, if “not according to knowledge”: strange schools in the University-Gothic style; externally picturesque; internally ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-warmed; but no worse than you would find in the great public schools. And Mrs. Rector looked after the sewing, and the girls’ ailments; and both husband and wife were diligent attendance officers, bribing, threatening, persuading parents and children.