Maintenant pour le profit de ceux a qui cela pourrait faire plaisir M. John ATWOOD.SLATER, cet artist nous communique bénévolement ce renseignegnement très spécial: Il est encore fort nageur! C'est lui qui aux dates de 22, 28 et 29 août a été signalé par la Normandie pour avoir fait à la nage le tour du Mont St. Michel: ce que personne jusqu'ici n'avait osé prétendre faire à cause des marées qui sont toujours très contraires.—J.A.S.
UNPUBLISHED LETTERS.
MUSIC.
To the Editor of The Times, London.
Sir,—Whilst admitting the all-importance and the austere role of circumstance weighted with interest, and fused to an all-volatile point sufficient to write to you concerning, and always entering, freed from schism, the moot point, I beg leave to advance the suggestion that (with correct apposition of sentiment, already said) the moment has arrived for an improvement to be effected in the Hymnal, in the public offices of St. Paul's Cathedral employed.
For the furtherance of this important item of diocesan and divine service, "Hymns, Ancient and Modern," be it well known, has stood the crucial test of a number of years; while its mechanical characteristics have been demonstrated all the way along the metronome number of decades it has served to mollify and assuage the griefs and passions, and inspire the consciences of congregations using it habitually as a vade mecum.
While believing in the sedate grandeur of its stereotyped orthodoxy, I powerfully plead, and in a tone of restraint, this prerogative: that the edition of hymns known as "The Hymnary," should upon examination be found to contain more agreeable, versatile value and fecundity of literary nutrition: honourably and scholastically capable of out-classing the rival for whose displacement I plead; and competent at once to put yet better light with wholesomer sustenance and rarer spiritual food into the minds of its privileged students.
The ideas and principles conceived by the once editors and publishers of the volume whose richly bestraught merits I champion, and whose solemn rights I plead, (in the year 1871), was to place in society at once, all electrified, au prémier coup canonized (armed at all points), a work which should at a moment be complete in law; self-contained and academically referable to the stringent junctures of an ecclesiastical, a national, and a polyphonetic tribunal: a work which should loyally attract the acclaim of co-existing literary hymnals, and ever would, it was reverently hoped—a sentiment which I, for one, favourably concur in—remain, the key-symbol of the Reformed, Anglican faith, with its near, true, and ever new ally—a note as high, silvery and jurisprudential; purified domestic co-partnership!
To further substantiate and enhance my devoutly expressed remarks, I confidently state that the compilation of "Hymns Ancient and Modern" was not originally in fact the outcome of an individual movement, or yet of a moment. At periods diverse, and at stages various, it matured its conditional purpose by repeated acts of regeneration and reform, by keeping generally within the radius of a stereotyped policy of pruning and paring; which consolidated by degrees and swept it on to the confines and the platform of its national respectability.
Be it even tacitly acknowledged, in surveying the genesis of Hymnology that the function of revision has once been, a fact, applied to the "Hymns Ancient and Modern" since the appearance of "The Hymnary," in my estimation under a less searching eye than that which all impartially discriminated and directed, at one and at one time only, the laying together and the consolidating of the "particles predelix" of this frankincense offering of the National Church; a work of classic intent and æsthetic outcome. Personal labour designed it purposely for the hearts of men, but not for their faces; a character which, Christian-like, it inseparably wears, like French martial music.