what he did not understand. The only
difference between the two dignitaries was.
that the one cared little about anything
connected with the service, and the other
let nothing alone. Under such a government,
the lives of the organist and choristers
were not, strictly speaking, blissful.

St. Vorax was a magnificent foundation.
It swallowed up the great tithes of four fat
livings, and paid some of its perpetual curates
with eighty pounds a year, and a house
which might, with judicious outlay, have been
made into a tolerable stable. It never gave
reasons for doing or not doing anything. If
you asked, what became of this? or what
could be done for that? it simply stared you
in the face, and bowed you out of the room.
It turned its sublime back upon government
commissions, wrapped itself up in
infallibility, and gave away everything it could
not keep to its nearest relations.

St. Vorax was partly an educational
establishment: indeed it is necessary that its sons,
nephews, and cousins should be taught; for
the best authorities are agreed on the excellence
of a domestic system of education; and
this was strictly followed at St. Vorax's. It
not only furnished solid pudding, but provided
likewise the knife and fork: it not only
gave away huge slices of preferment, but
first paid for the education necessary to
obtain it. Under such circumstances, the
paternal quivers of the canons were remarkably
full.

It is difficult to be out of humour when
you have your own way in everything; yet
the Dean and Chapter of St. Vorax had the
reputation of being uncommonly irritable.
Indeed, they were terrible people to deal
with. Those who did not get insulted, got
snubbed; and those who were not snubbed,
only escaped snubbing by putting up with
every sort of ill treatment, without venturing
on any sort of complaint.

The organ of St. Vorax had been for some
time in a wretched plight. The pedal pipes
(the basest of which was formerly vaunted,
as capable of holding a butt of beer) now
held bushels of dust: the vox humana, a stop
indeed, was dumb: and not a squeak could
be squeezed out of the sesquipedilla. The
organist—a lover of his art—appealed to the
Chapter vigorously and continuously; and at
last succeeded in getting something done to
the organ. But his happiness was transient;
when the instrument had been repaired and
perfected to his ears' content, Canon Vellum
would scarcely allow him to use it; but
reduced the whole service to a bungling
compromise, which was neither cathedral,
parochial, nor collegiate.

But the singing birds! The white-robed
cherubs, whose pretty voices would float
down that noble vista of Norman arches,
who would still remind you of devotion and
a cathedral having some connection.

They, like the Canon's sons, received an
education; although, strange to say, their
schoolmaster knew and taught nothing
beyond Murray's Grammar, Rule of Three,
and a smattering of Latin and Greek. The
schoolmaster was a coarse, vulgar, ill-paid,
and therefore cross-grained individual, who
thrashed the boys quite as much as Canon
Vellum desired, and taught them as little as
the authorities cared for them to know.
Nor was the diet the "angel's food " which
Milton has described. The cherubs were
fed upon doubtful mutton and coarse wedges
of pudding, doled out on alternate days, with
some beer quite bad enough to have been
sent away from the refectory at St. Cross,
as too bad even for pilgrims. But, despite
the pudding and the beer, the boys sang
gloriously, and people came to hear them,
even when the Dean was going to preach.
The stipend they received was certainly
better than it was in many other cathedrals.
They had neither been reduced to five-and-
eightpence per quarter, nor had their school-
house been pulled down to make way for a
stable.

We recollect seeing in a kitchen, somewhere
near a very great place of education—and a
place where such cherubs are very ill kept—
a quaint picture representing an allegorical
embodiment of the qualities requisite to form
a good servant. An ass's head, among other
details, is supposed to indicate his willingness
to endure any kind of usage his master may
please to inflict. Our schoolmaster, wisely reflecting
that such a moral was much better
adapted to the Middle Ages than to the spirit
of modern times, had fallen upon a new
interpretation;—a man (he construed the
allegory) was an ass who did more than he
could help doing; and he acted up to the
very letter of his belief.

To relate how deputies of all kinds
(probably more competent than the master,
although he never troubled himself to
ascertain the fact) used to attend the school;
how the school-hours were any hours that
the master did not find an excuse for
being somewhere else; how the boys were,
out of school-hours, left to learn the sort of
morality which may be picked up in the
streets, or anywhere else, would be a sad
tale indeed. To relate how, for years and
years, the singing-birds were allowed to
wander about to the rooms of dissipated
students who invited them for the sake of hearing
them sing, and how early they became
acquainted with the morality of college-
rooms, would be nothing compared with the
bare fact that, on no single occasion, had
the authorities visited the school, or tested
the efficiency of its management by a public
examination.

At length the scandal of making innocent
children witness and even participate in the
riot and debauchery of their seniors grew to
be so glaring, that a peremptory order was
issued, forbidding visits to men's rooms. This