and catechising in season and out of season," he had "frequently some thousands of hearers," and that "usually the churches were so thronged by nine o'clock in the morning that he had much adoe to get to the pulpit." The diarist adds, "How the Prince Rupert's soldiers there caryed themselves at and near Cartmel, that country will tell to posterity," though, if it did, the "posterity" to whom it was told neglected to hand down the story. It is only fair to say that some of the most reprehensible acts of vandalism to which the edifice has been subjected have been perpetrated within the present century. From the time of the Commonwealth until the Victorian era ecclesiastical architecture was comparatively neglected, and it is perhaps fortunate for the present generation that it should have been, else we might have seen many a grand old Gothic pile of pre-Reformation date destroyed to make room for miserable monstrosities of brick of the fashion of the Queen Anne and the Georgian periods, a style that a wretched taste has within the last few years sought to resuscitate. Little more than two generations ago architectural art was at its lowest ebb, with little prospect of its ever being revived. Utilitarianism was the order of the day, and, much as we are disposed to blame country churchwardens for their misdoings, half our indignation vanishes when we remember that they only followed the example set them by their betters. Fifty years ago or thereabouts the "Improvers" were let loose upon the ancient fane at Cartmel, when, as Mr. Stockdale in his _Annales Caermoelensis_ tells us, "the wooden rails of the Harrington monument, split with the axe out of logs of oak, before the use of the plane or the general use of the saw (indices of high antiquity), were torn down and committed to the flames, and a smart iron railing put up in their stead. The quaintly-fashioned old font, at which the whole population of the parish of Cartmel--generation after generation--had been christened for nearly seven hundred years, was subjected anew to the mason's chisel, and fashioned into its present shape, and a modern date (1832) cut in large figures upon it. The old Matin Bell, which had summoned the monks of St. Mary to prayers for three hundred and fifty years, and afterwards the townspeople of Cartmel and the neighbourhood to their duties on saints' days and Sundays for nearly three hundred and fifty years more, was torn down from its resting place, and sold to a neighbouring gentleman--not to call his workmen and labourers to their prayers, but to warn them that the hour for the commencement of their daily toil had arrived." Since then, however, happier days have dawned upon the place.