of style, advocates the detached or semi-detached campanile; and recommends architects to direct their attention more frequently to this matter. Another way in which church bells manifest, if not a scientific or artistic, at least a historical value, is in their connection with the saints of the Catholic Church; they are still existing records of a very old ecclesiastical custom. The bell of a church was frequently, if not generally, named after the patron saint of that church; and if there were more bells than one, the lowest in tone was named after the patron saint, and the others after saints to whom altars, shrines, or chapels within the edifice were dedicated. Probably, in such case, each bell was appropriated to the service of its own particular saint; for the use of many bells in a _peal_ is comparatively modern. At Durham cathedral, and at the church of St Bartholomew the Great near Smithfield, are (or were recently) examples of a family of bells receiving names bearing special relation to the particular fabric for which they were intended. Archaeologists claim for church bells a certain value in regard to the inscriptions which they nearly always bear, and which serve as so many guide-posts directing to facts belonging to past ages. Each great bell-founder (and many of them belonged to monastic institutions) had his own particular style of ornamentation, and his own favorite inscription, monogram, or epigraph. Sometimes it was only his own name; sometimes a name and a date; sometimes a pious ejaculation. The towns of Norwich, Lynn, Colchester, Salisbury, etc., had all celebrated families of bell-founders, in the days when the later Gothic cathedrals and churches were built. {33} The earliest known _dated_ bell is at Fribourg, bearing the year 1258, and the inscription: _"O Rex Gloriae, veni cum pace; me resonante pia populo succurre Maria."_ The oldest in England is supposed to be that at Duncton in Sussex, dated 1319. London can boast one a little over four centuries old, at All Hallows Staining, Mark Lane. The inscriptions on the bells, in the days when saints patronized them, were mostly in Latin, in most cases including the entreaty, _"Ora pro nobis_" (Pray for us). Sometimes the mottoes adverted to the many uses which church bells subserved, such as: "Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum, Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro." Even this did not exhaust the list; for we meet with an enumeration of nearly twenty purposes answered by church bells--some of which we should be little disposed to recognize in these scientific days of ours. The following is not an actual motto on a bell, but an elegy on the subject: