outline to testify its original consecration. And now to trace its history, since, wrested from the mendicants, and deprived of its rights as a cemetery for the wealthy and beneficent dead, it first became the banquet chamber for municipal feasts, its walls shone gorgeously with tapestry hangings, and its tables groaned beneath the weight of luscious dainties. The kitchens and monster chimneys, with their long rows of spit-hooks and fire-places, that now stand gaping in silent desolation at the empty larders and boiling-houses in out-of-the-way corners of the premises, look like giant ghosts of ancient civic gastronomy, lurking about in dark places, mocking the shadowy forms of latter-day epicurism, that may be satisfied with the achievements to be performed by modern “ranges,” on ever so improved a scale. But the glories of the St. George’s feast are likewise departed from it; the corn-merchants, to whom its limits were awhile devoted, have built unto themselves an exchange; the assizes, once held in it, have been transferred to the little castellated encrustation that has grown out of one side of the real castle mound, and reft of all regular employment, the Hall now stands at the mercy of the city mayor, by him to be lent to whom he wills, for any or every purpose his judgment may deem consistent with propriety; hence the same walls echo one day the eloquent pleadings of a league advocate, the next to the cries of the distressed agriculturist; now to the advantages of temperance or peace societies, and the musical streams of eloquence that an Elihu Burritt can send forth, or witness the fires of enthusiasm a Father Matthew can elicit. Another week shall see it thronged with eager listeners to the reports of missionary societies, Church, London, or Baptist; the next with ready auditors to the claims of the Jews and the heathen calls for Bibles; interspersed among them shall be lectures on every branch of art and science, and every fashionable or unfashionable doctrine under the sun that can find advocates, down to Mormonism or Bloomerism itself. But prior to all in its claims upon the services of the magnificent old structure stands _music_—why else are its proportions hid by the unsightly tiers of benches that, empty, make one long for magic power to waft them all away, but which, once tenanted by their legitimate occupants, banish every murmur from one’s heart and mind?