The learned Lorente has reprinted the "Concilium" also in his work entitled _Monumens Historiques concernant les deux Pragmatiques Sanctions_. There can, therefore, be no just grounds for doubting the character of this precious article. BIBLIOTHECAR. CHETHAM. * * * * * PULPIT HOUR-GLASSES. (Vol. viii., pp. 82. 209. 279. 328. 454. 525.) I should be glad to see some more information in your pages relative to the _early_ use of the pulpit hour-glass. It is said that the ancient fathers preached, as the old Greek and Roman orators declaimed, by this instrument; but were the sermons of the ancient fathers an hour long? Many of those in St. Augustine's ten volumes might be delivered with distinctness in seven or eight minutes; and some of those of Latimer and his contemporaries, in about the same time. But, Query, are not the _printed_ sermons of these divines merely outlines, to be filled up by the preacher _extempore_? Dyos, in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross, in 1570, speaking of the walking and profane talking in the church at sermon time, also laments how they grudged the preacher his _customary hour_. So that an hour seems to have been the practice at the Reformation. {253} The hour-glass was used equally by the Catholics and Protestants. In an account of the fall of the house in Blackfriars, where a party of Romanists were assembled to hear one of their preachers, in 1623, the preacher is described as-- "Having on a surplice, girt about his middle with a linnen girdle, and a tippet of scarlet on both his shoulders. He was attended by a man that brought after him his book and _hour-glass_."--See _The Fatal Vespers_, by Samuel Clark, London, 1657. In the Preface to the Bishops' _Bible_, printed by John Day in 1569, Archbishop Parker is represented with an _hour-glass_ at his right hand. And in a work by Franchinus Gaffurius, entitled _Angelicum ac Divinum opus Musice_, printed at Milan in 1508, is a curious representation of the author seated in a pulpit, with a book in his hand; an _hour-glass_ on one side, and a bottle on the other; lecturing to an audience of twelve persons. This woodcut is engraved in the second volume of Hawkins' _History of Music_, p. 333.