CHAPTER III.

The ecclesiastical government of the parish of Manchester is vested in the Warden and four Fellows of the Collegiate Church. Patronage is dispensed by them; but, as changes are in progress, it is not necessary to enter more fully into the detail of existing arrangements. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners have recently advised that Manchester and the great county in which it is situate, (with the exception of the Deanery of Furness and Cartmel) should be placed under the superintendence of a Bishop. The Collegiate Church will then become a cathedral-the title of Warden and Fellows will merge in that of Dean and Canons, and an Archdeaconry of Manchester will be created. The See will be subject to the metropolitan jurisdiction of the Archbishop of York. The stipend of the Bishop will be £5000 per annum, and it will be necessary to provide for him a suitable residence. The revenues of existing Bishoprics will be reduced for the purpose of augmenting the poorer, and creating stipends for the new, Sees. It is also probable that there may be some remodelling of the pecuniary affairs of all the Collegiate Churches.

The Warden, the head of the Church, succeeded to that distinguished post upon the death of Dr. Blackburne, who, on Sunday the fifth January, 1823, was seized with sudden illness in the Church, which proved fatal on the tenth. Dr. Calvert owes his preferment only to his high merit as a scholar and a divine. He received his education at St.

John's, Cambridge, in which college he obtained a Fellowship, and subsequently became Tutor; he was also Lady Margaret's Preacher and Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the University. He was made likewise a preacher at Whitehall, whence (having previously published a course of sermons at the request of the Bishop of London) he was preferred to the Rectory of Wilmslow by the Earl of Liverpool, then Prime Minister. The Noble Earl subsequently recommended Dr. Calvert to George the Fourth as the successor of Dr. Blackburne in the Wardency of the Collegiate Church. With this brief mention of the esteemed head of the religious institutions of the town, we pass to the venerable and time-worn edifice itself.

If there be any truth in that beautiful verse of the poet

"There is society where none intrudes,"

and if ever it were capable of being fully and unequivocally put to the test, a ramble through the religious interstices of our Collegiate Church, "that antique oratory," may be made to answer at once the double purpose of enjoyment and of criticism. Surrounded by the dim shadows of the mighty ones of old, we pay no heed to the great roof that overhangs us, "all musical in its immensities"-we think not of the carved walls and their ancient appurtenances, mouldering beneath the damp of centuriesour mind gets not by heart their eloquent proportions; we do not gaze

"With awe which would adore
The worship of the place, or the mere praise
Of art and its great masters, who could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor thought, could plan."

All this is as nothing, for a spirit glides beside us and talks with us, and we ramble through the old aisles and the ancient chapelries, and over the effaced gravestones of our ancestry, and know not that corporeally we exist. With our mind's eye we are looking upon the glorious company of the benefactors of our race, who have passed

into oblivion, when the world was younger and more grateful than in this, its day of greater things. We are gazing upon the noble army of zealous defenders of the venerable creed of our Church, and inly exclaiming, as we think of other heroes and remoter times, "how are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!" And we are listening at the same time to the mild rebukes of this grim array of the progenitors of our faith, the burthen of whose complainings hath in it more of sorrow than of anger, and who seem to murmur, because in this our generation men have gone up to Mount Pisgah to worship, eschewing the ceremonials which of yore placed at such a distance the creature and the Creator. We ramble on,

spirit walking

void of all self-control, the same gentle by our side, and as we tread upon the obliterated memorials of those who have been high in the world's estimation, great in prowess and mighty in renown, and yet of whom the stones prate of no whereabout, nay, of whose very names not one vestige is left upon which to establish conjecture— we cry out in lamentation, "Who hath the glory! who hath the glory!" Thus wend we on through the labyrinth of the dead, over the pillows of the sleeping ones; and, as we advance, our mortality becomes purer, and for a time, without impiety, we feel only a little lower than the angels.

Look round- -can you contemplate, unmoved, a scene so fraught with sublimity? Can you fix your eyes upon the recording tablets that in every direction meet them, and not become wiser and better, by such collision, than if you were to spend years in perusing the written lines of which these are but, as it were, the index? And by whom are you thus surrounded? Upon whose dust are you trampling, as you pace the melancholy aisles? Come with us, and in our humble capacity and to our utmost power we will tell you of the shadows that are about you. Not, however, in the language of poesy, nor in that

sombre diction which would probably be most adapted to our task, will we hold forth to you concerning these things-for, to tell the honest truth, our forte is not in the pathetic. We are, in fact, somewhat of a gossip, and only in the plain and ungarnished words of our schoolday vocabulary can we give to the airy nothings of our brain " a local habitation and a name."

Proceeding, then, along the north aisle of the Church, and passing through the iron gates that separate the naive from the choir, let us turn immediately to the left, and we are in the chapel of the Earls of Derby, built, says tradition, in order to enclose the remains of one whose incontinence had deprived him of burial within the walls of the sanctuary. Over the door-way are emblazoned the heraldic insignia of an illegitimate scion of that house, whose knightly father, some centuries bye-gone, became Warden of the Church, and ultimately the proud Bishop of Ely. Within this same chapelrie he lies interredyonder is his tomb, and upon it are carved shields of arms and mitres and crosiers, and a brief inscription, the bare outlines of which alone are left to tell of all that has been and is no more. He wedded with the mother of the Seventh Henry-he builded Churches-and "died from off the face of the earth”—and this darkened spot is now his palace and his Bishopric!

In the lobby of this chapel are three monuments to beings of less exalted dust; one to the memory of Mrs. Katherine Pigot, who died in 1792; another to the Rev. John Clayton, whilome Chaplain and Fellow of this Church, who died in 1773; and a third to the memory of George Lloyd, Esq., barrister-at-law, "who was equally distinguished for his amiable disposition in private life, and for his judgment and integrity as a lawyer." He died aged fifty-six, in the year 1804. These, in life, might have been too lowly for the companionship of nobility,

but in death they lay almost pillowed with the spouse of a Queen Dowager, and yet are not scowled upon for their close neighbourhood. Here also are memorialised, Richard, only son of Christopher Hartley, of Marston, in Yorkshire, who died in 1739; and the Rev. Richard Ward, L. L. D., who died in 1789, and was one of the Church's Chaplains.

Gliding across the aisle into the choir—

"Relic of nobler days and noblest arts"

we stand upon the grave of the first Warden of the Church -Sir John Huntingdon. His were the days when priesthood and peace were not necessarily allied, when the leaders of the hosts of GOD were almost looked upon as the leaders of the armies of men, and in his double vocation he acted valiantly the parts that were allotted him to do-and yet, "without a stone to mark the spot," he lies buried within the space that he had himself built for the purpose of chanting the praises of Jehovah, and where, for more than thirty years, he had stood up to worship the Trinity in Unity

"And nothing outward tells of human clay !"

Further on, and to the left of the door-way of the chapter-house, is a memento of another Warden of this edifice the persecuted Heyrick. Under the Protectorship of the puritanical Cromwell, this too-conceding man suffered hardships and privations of almost every malignity was dragged from his high office as a minister of GOD-jeered at by a psalm-singing rabble, and cast into prison- and only afterwards allowed to visit his flock and to preach to them occasionally, because it was thought the trifling pittance allowed to him by the Parliament would induce him to be the more cautious in his holdings forth. With the restoration, however, of Charles the Second, came the re-instalment of Heyrick; he died in the fulfilment of his duties, and now sleeps well beneath the roof that most fitly can shelter him.