Tell'y--did'y ever hear Such a story, true but queer, How 'twixt Christmas and New Year The flock had ate their Passon?" There was non-residence undoubtedly previous to the Act against holding more than one living at a time, unless near together. Men of birth and influence obtained a good deal of preferment, but never in post-Reformation times to the extent that this abuse existed before. To take but one instance. Thomas Cantilupe, who died in 1282, was Precentor and Canon of York, Archdeacon of Stafford and Canon of Lichfield, Canon of London, Canon of Hereford, and held the livings of Doderholt, Hampton, Aston, Wintringham, Deighton, Rippel, Sunterfield, and apparently also Prestbury. Pretty well! It was never so bad in the maligned Hanoverian period. I had a living in Essex which was held formerly by a certain Bramston Staynes, who was a squarson in Essex, and held simultaneously three other livings; there was one curate to serve the three churches. The rector is said to have visited one of his livings twice only in the twenty years of his incumbency--once to read himself in, the other time to settle some dispute relative to the payment of his tithes. I can recall several instances of the old scholar-parson, a man chap-ful of quotations. One, a very able classic, and a great naturalist, was rather fond of the bottle. "Mr. West," said a neighbour one day, "I hear you have a wonderfully beautiful spring of water in your glebe." "Beautiful! surpassing! _fons Blandusiæ, splendidior vitro!_-- water so good that I never touch it--afraid of drinking too much of it." Some twenty-five years ago I knew another, a fine scholar, an old bachelor, living in a very large rectory. He was a man of good presence, courteous, old-world manners, and something of old-world infirmities. His sense of his religious responsibilities in the parish was different in quality to that affected now-a-days. He was very old when I knew him, and was often laid up with gout. One day, hearing that he was thus crippled, I paid him a visit, and encountered a party of women descending the staircase from his room. When I entered he said to me, "I suppose you met little Mary So-and-so and Janie What's-her-name going out? I've been churching them up here in my bed-room, as I can't go to church."