and there the _Ardens_: such and such was their story; and such and such were the merits of the sculpture. Chantrey had visited these figures, and assured him that they were the finest in the kingdom; and if I imagined, at the time, that such was merely Sir Francis’ courtesy to the worthy Vicar, I hope I may be forgiven, for some subsequent acquaintance with such things inclines me to believe the sculptor was sincere. On the walls were the heavy tablets of the Hanoverian period, and our attention was directed to the marked decline of art, from the period of the Crusades down to the Georges, growing worse and worse till George Fourth’s time, which improved the existing style, and was succeeded by a period of rapid return to correct taste and principle. Of all this the Church itself bore witness. Here the worthy man pointed out marks of its various stages of decline: here were barbarous repairs; there a sad blunder of old Church-wardens; here a wanton mutilation of Hanoverianism in 1790, when the very worst things happened to the holy and beautiful house; and there, at last, was a fine restoration of our own times. We were next conducted to the church-yard, the Vicar having doffed his surplice, and assumed his usual habit, which partook of the dignity and taste of its wearer in a pleasing degree. His hat was specially ecclesiastical, and turned up at the sides, and over his cassock and bands he wore a clerical surtout, so that as he strode over the graves, in his small-clothes, displaying a finely proportioned leg, his entire figure might have been thought contemporary with that of his brother of Wakefield. We now learned the history of the Church, its great tithe, and its various plunderings under successive bad kings. We viewed the tower and spire from every possible point of vantage, and then went round the walls to see where a window had been blocked up, or a doorway broken through, or a pointed arch displaced for a square-headed debasement of the Tudor period. I never found before so good a “sermon in stones.” An ancient yew-tree was pointed out as having afforded boughs, before the reformation, for the celebration of Palm-Sunday. We adjourned to the Vicarage, where luncheon was served in the Library, a room filled with the choicest volumes; and then we were dismissed for a walk, promising to return, for our dinner, at five o’clock.