Most of the leading minds whose zeal and energy directed the earlier movements of the various musical societies in this district, are yet among the living, and the natural dictates of refinement cause us to shrink from any attempts at their biographies; it is, therefore, with the deference due to real genius, which needs no praise, that we pass in silence over the names of the most earnest promoters of the growth and cultivation of music, especially as developed in the workings of the Festival Committee, and its important adjunct, the Choral Society. The names and fame of Sir George Smart and Mr. Edward Taylor, professor of music at Gresham College, are already too much the property of the world at large to be reckoned among those whose privacy might be invaded by comment in these pages; but there are many more, who with them, may from the centre of that magnificent hall, and the midst of the greatest triumphs of music that have ever been achieved by its almost unrivalled choruses and orchestra, feel that “for their monument we must look around.” And now it might seem but just and right that among the lions of the “Old City” we should find a place for the manifold ecclesiastical structures still surviving the downfall of “superstition,” and retaining their legitimate right, as houses of worship. To do justice to the antiquities or beauties that abound among them is a task beyond our powers, or the limit of such a work as this; their traceries, their curiously cut flint work, old carvings, rood lofts, chambers of sanctuary within, and heaped-up grave-yards without, verily burying the pathways of the streets, they line in such close succession—their monuments and epitaphs, quaint, grim, chaste, and uncouth; their steeples, spires, and towers, round, square, buttressed and bare—their bells musical and grand, cracked and jangling—their roofs slated, tiled, leaded, patched, perfect, or crumbling—their names and saintships a labyrinth of mystery in themselves—would it not fill a volume alone to chronicle even their leading features, to say nought of the changes they have undergone, the barter among goods and chattels, the chopping and changing, and massacres in the painted glass departments,—part of an Abraham and his ass left in a St. Andrews, the other portions transported to the windows of St. Stephens; of the ghostly outlines left of old brasses torn up and melted down by Puritan soldiers and coppersmiths—or the legends that hang about their shrines and mutilated images? We dare not venture upon the well-beaten track of archæologians, topographers, and tourists; our glance must be cursory and superficial, content to ascertain by its sweeping survey that treasures of knowledge and stores of information await the patient and diligent investigations of more learned and scientific enquirers.