One of the most interesting antiquities of Jarrow Church, Northumberland, is the chair of the Venerable Bede. It is preserved in the vestry of the church, whither all brides repair as soon as the marriage service is over, to seat themselves upon it. This, according to the popular belief, will make them the joyful mothers of children; and the expectant mothers (as I have been informed) would not consider the marriage ceremony complete, until they had been enthroned in the Venerable Bede's chair. The chair is very rude and substantial; made of oak; in height, four feet ten inches; having an upright back, and sides that slope off for the arms. According to the barbarous English fashion, it is carved over with the nomenclature of all the vulgar obscurities of the neighbourhood, whose sacrilegious penknives, together with the wanton depredations of relic-hunters, have so "shorn" the chair of its "fair proportions," that soon nothing but its attenuated form, "small by degrees, and beautifully less," will be left for the future Childe Harold to address with-- "Can it be, That this is all remains of thee?" Every foreigner who has visited our churches and cathedrals cannot fail to remark how the English love of popularity glares forth in its most sickly form in this barbarous custom of writing and carving names upon monuments, or other works of art. Every observant person, too, when he sees John Smith's name and full address, scratched with painful and elaborate accuracy upon the stern but noseless face of some alabaster knight, while he wonders at the gratuitous trouble which John Smith has taken, must deplore the want of education thus so lamentably evinced. Happily, this vulgar taste (so far as our churches are concerned) is now under some control; but, nevertheless, it is still sad to see--at Lichfield, for example--that control obliged to take the visible shape of railings, to prevent Messrs. Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson from handing their names down to posterity on the life-like marble of Chantrey's "Sleeping Children." I have heard that this mode of defacing monuments took its rise in the time of the Protectorate; and I would wish to put this in the form of a _Query_: Whether it was so, or no? With the impression that it _was_ the case, I have for many years past examined the dates that accompanied names scratched upon monuments, and never found a date earlier than the Protectorate. The subject seems worth the inquiry. To return to Bede's chair. It has often been engraved: but the best representation of it that I know, is that by Mr. W. B. Scott, in his _Antiquarian Gleanings of the North of England_. Besides his careful etching of the present state of the chair, he also gives a suggestive woodcut of its restoration. The ornamental portion he confines to the front of the seat, and the head of the chair. CUTHBERT BEDE, B.A.