it every day as they proceeded in building. The Italians, (among whom were yet some Greek refugees,) and with them French, Germans and Flemings, joined into a fraternity of architects, procuring papal bulls for their encouragement, and particular privileges; they styled themselves Freemasons, and ranged from one nation to another, as they found churches to be built. Their government was regular, and when they fixed near the building in hand, they made a camp of huts. A surveyor governed in chief; every tenth man was called a warden and overlooked each nine; the gentlemen of the neighbourhood, either out of charity or commutation of penance, gave the materials and carriages. Those who have seen the exact accounts in records of the charge of the fabrics of some of our cathedrals, near four hundred years old, cannot but have a great esteem for their economy, and admire how soon they erected such lofty structures.' Sir Christopher, in this outline of masonic history, has blended conjecture and tradition; he was a good craftsman and wise. We have never been initiated in the Eleusiniau mysteries of the lodge; Jachin and Boaz have never received our homage: yet it appears to us that Sir Christopher has erred not on the side of vainglory, but of self-denial; and that he has diminished the antiquity of the Fraternity instead of enhancing it. St. Alban and King Alfred may or may not have been patrons of the brotherhood, but masonic language may be traced in the reign of Charlemagne. In a preceding era, there are reasons for conjecturing its existence. Subsequent ages afford presumptive evidence that the Freemasons were the architects of the proudest Gothic piles. Some have maintained that until the statute of 3 Henry VI. c. i. which greatly impaired their organization and prosperity, by prohibiting them from meeting in their chapters, they enjoyed a kind of building monopoly in this country. In an indenture of covenants, made in this reign, between the churchwardens of a Parish in Suffolk and a company of Freemasons, the latter stipulate that each man should be provided with a pair of white leather gloves and a white apron; and that a lodge, properly tiled, should be erected at the expense of the Parish, in which they were to carry on their works. It has been suggested that the members of this ancient society enwrapped themselves in mystery, in order to conceal the method of cutting the archstones, the trait des pierres as it is termed in French, from the profane multitude. Whether their rites may not have also veiled doctrinal mysteries, we shall perhaps have another opportunity of examining; at present we must content ourselves with observing, that it seems probable that about the time when they borrowed the pointed arch from the east, they also became grafted into the vast congeries of the Manichæan sects, which flourished in the middle ages.

Disclaiming, as we are compelled to do, the honours unduly claimed for the English and the Anglo-Normans, as the inventors of Gothic Architecture, we shall yet insist upon the praise to which we are fairly entitled. It is the English alone who labour to preserve the memory of the structures of Normandy, which are doomed to neglect and destruction by the disgraceful sloth and ignorance of the French. We are not at all disposed to set an undue estimate upon our English topographers. Very unequal degrees of merit must be assigned to these writers, from the quaint and antique Lambarde, down to the elegance and learning of Whitaker: many of them are woeful triflers, often mistaking the shell for the kernel: but good or bad, they could not have flourished any where except amongst a people who loved their homes, and whose affection caused them to value every iota of information connected with the history and institutions of their native soil. To the French, all memorials of former times seem hateful; and, from the general absence of the desire of knowledge in that country, no work which supposes a disposition for rational curiosity in the common reader, can possibly meet with favour or encouragement. The task of illustrating the ancient monuments of France has thus devolved upon us. We did not raise or plau these relics of piety and magnificence; but whilst the owners of such noble structures are dull to their beauties, and incapable of appreciating their value, we have made them English property, like the Alhambra and the Parthenon, the rock-temples of Ellora and the sepulchres of Thebes, the mosques of Delhi and the ruins of Palmyra. Abandoned by their possessors, the fields have become our own, by the tillage which we have bestowed upon them.

ART. VII.-Annals of the Parish, or the Chronicle of Dalmailing, during the Ministry of the Rev. Micah Balwhidder, written by himself; arranged and edited by the Author of the Ayrshire Legatees. Edinburgh. 1821. pp. 400. THE

HE extraordinary success of what (for want of an author's name) we are obliged to designate as the Scotch novels, has produced a crowd of imitators, without a single rival; and we have not thought it respectful to our readers to notice a shoal of copies and parodies which have but one merit, that of proving the popularity, and, we may add, the inimitability of their prototype.

We are induced, however, to depart from our rule by the work before us, because, though it undoubtedly must be considered as the literary offspring of the Scotch Novels, it has some peculiar features which distinguish it from the servile herd of imitators; for it so far resembles other and earlier productions, that it is the period

of its appearance, rather than its intrinsic quality, that determines its filiation; and it also exhibits some original, and we think clever, views of nature, which entitle it to a distinct, though brief notice on our part.

If any of our readers have had the misfortune to wade through the three volumes of trash and tediousness called the Earthquake, attributed, like this work, to the Author of the Ayrshire Legatees, he will expect little amusement from such a pen; and he will be very agreeably disappointed :—the Earthquake' is altogether absurd, unnatural-we will venture to add, contemptible-the Annals of the Parish are easy and unaffected; and though their scope be narrow, and their pretensions low, they will be found to contain some touches of that charm which nature, however humble, never fails to possess.

It is in being a description of humble Scottish life, delivered in the peculiar phraseology of the lowlands, neither altogether Scottish nor English, that the Annals of the Parish may be said chiefly to resemble the works of the author of Waverley; but the editor is perhaps hardly less indebted to that humorous sketch, The Memoirs of P. P. Parish Clerk,' and to the Vicar of Wakefield, one of the most pleasant, and, at the same time, one of the most pathetic novels in the English language. The Annals of the Parish are not equal to the Scottish novels in national delineation, nor to the Memoirs of P. P. in quaintness and general satire; nor to the Vicar of Wakefield in either the humour or the tenderness of that admirable work; but they have a relish of all these, which rendered them agreeable to our palates, and which, we think, may please, for a few hours, the taste of any reader who does not disdain

'The short and simple annals of the poor.'.

The Rev. Micah Balwhidder was placed and settled as Minister of the Parish of Dalmailing, in the same year, and on the same day of the month, in which his sacred Majesty, King George, third of the name, came to his crown and kingdom;' and with a certain self-importance he records that his retirement took place about the very period of the infirm monarch's secession from his high duties, and he gives us to understand that he fancies that there is some kind of relation, if not similitude, between their respective reigns.

His induction, however, was stormy, and of bad augury; he was, it seems, presented by the Patron, and the Parishioners, with a true Knoxian independence, refused to receive a teacher at the hands of any lord of flesh and blood; they nailed up the kirk doors, and the new minister and his friends were obliged to make their way in and out through one of the windows, not without some of those accidents which might be naturally expected from such an unusual mode of church-going, especially when performed in the

face

face of a hostile mob. Patience, good-humour, and good intentions, however, in no long space overcame even the most mutinous, and the dominion of Mr. Balwhidder seems to have become, and to have continued, highly popular and tranquil.

Of course, the minister gives us frequent portraits of his principal parishioners: we shall quote the first we met, as an instance of the style of minute, and often pathetic painting with which Mr. Balwhidder unconsciously, as it were, amuses or touches us. She was

'I have now to speak of the coming of Mrs. Malcolm. the widow of a Clyde shipmaster, that was lost at sea with his vessel. She was a genty body, calm and methodical. From morning to night she sat at her wheel, spinning the finest lint, which suited well with her pale hands. She never changed her widow's weeds, and she was aye as if she had just been ta'en out of a band-box. The tear was often in her e'e when the bairns were at the school; but when they came home, her spirit was lighted up with gladness, although, poor woman, she had many a time very little to give them.'-p. 16.

The story of these poor children, though not what may be called the plot of a work which has none, contributes its principal events; it begins with their youth, and after conducting them through various and progressive stages of fortune, ends with their final and happy establishment. And if the wig and profession of Mr. Balwhidder, and the homely persons, characters, and number of his three wives, are—as we admit them to be-incompatible with the received ideas of the hero and heroines of a novel, then, Charles Malcolm and his sister Kate must be installed in their room. We do not intend to give any thing like a view of the story-it is too scattered and diffuse for our crucible-we merely propose to select a few passages which struck us as evincing the powers of the author, and as likely to induce our readers to a perusal of the work itself.

The picture of a parish rake, exiled by the unfortunate success of a love-affair, and discovered, after many years, with a grey head and wooden leg in Chelsea Hospital, is marked by the quiet pathos and quaint humour, the union of which seems to be the author's chief characteristic.

And who should this old man be, but the very identical Rab Rickerton, that was art and part in Meg Glaik's disowned bairn; but had turned out a good soldier; and so, in his old days, was an in-door pensioner, and very comfortable; and he said that he had, to be sure, spent his youth in the devil's service, and his manhood in the King's, but his old age was given to that of his Maker, which I was blithe and thankful to hear; and he inquired about many a one in the parish, the blooming and the green of his time, but they were all dead and buried; and he had a contrite and penitent spirit, and read his Bible every day, delighting most in the Book of Joshua, the Chronicles and the Kings.'-p. 25.

The following sly and yet simple allusions to village superstition is full of truth: the worthy Minister does not quite believe that the coincidences were miraculous, but he notes them with a gravity which shows that he rather expected that 'something might have come o't.'

'About the close of this year, there was a great sough of old prophecies, foretelling mutations and adversities, chiefly on account of the canal that was spoken of to join the rivers of the Clyde and the Forth, it being thought an impossible thing to be done; and the Adam and Eve pear-tree, in our garden, budded out in an awful manner, and had divers flourishes on it at Yule, which was thought an ominous thing, especially as the second Mrs. Balwhidder was at the downlying with my eldest son Gilbert, that is the merchant in Glasgow, but nothing came o't.'-p. 91.

And again

There was a great laugh when auld Mizy Spaewell came hirpling with her bachle in her hand, and flung it after him for gude luck. Mizy had a wonderful faith in freats, and was just an oracle of sagacity at expounding dreams, and bodes of every sort and description-besides, she was reckoned one of the best howdies in her day; but by this time she was grown frail and feckless, and she died the same year on Hallowe'en, which made every body wonder, that it should have so fallen out for her to die on Hallowe'en.'-p. 37.

In the year 1764, Mr. Balwhidder lost his first wife, whom he lamented with that moderation which belonged to his character; he resolved to erect a kind of monument to her memory, and in the lonesome and dreary winter which followed her decease, he found, as he informs us, 'the getting of the monument ready a blessed entertainment. He had intended to inscribe it with a Latin epitaph, but he was induced to abandon this idea by an obvious and yet original objection which struck him, that Mrs. Balwhidder, worthy woman as she was, did not understand the Latin tongue,' and so he commemorated her virtues in a language which she might understand if she should have occasion to read her own epitaph.

Public events, and the general progress in arts and manufacture, found their way, late and by slow degrees, into Dalmailing, but they did reach that remote district at last, and brought with them much disquiet and perplexity to Mr. Balwhidder. We suspect that the chief design of the author was to exhibit the progress of modern improvement in a distant village; and although he has certainly marked some of the benefits and disadvantages which the manufacturing system produces, we do not look upon these as the happiest parts of his work: they are not unamusing, and they are natural, but they are not conceived with any great originality,

told