an object of imitation. It is this which seems to render it needful that his character should be scrutinized, and his merits tried by a more just and accurate standard.

The chief lesson, however, after all, is the utter vanity of such a course as Peel's, when the light of a future state is allowed to shine upon it. His father and himself had fixed their aim on an object which seemed to them a lofty one; and so, indeed, if this world were all, it unquestionably was. To rule, under the authority of the crown, the greatest empire which the world ever saw, is undoubtedly an amount of power which might seem almost too vast for a mortal's grasp. Any just appreciation of its immense responsibilities and its innumerable difficulties, would lead a man not blinded by ambition and self-confidence, to cry out with Moses, O Lord, not on me lay this vast burden! That a Lancashire cotton-spinner should resolve on "manufacturing a prime minister;" that he should keep this one object in his own view, and in his son's view, through twenty or thirty years; that the premiership should be "the Promised Land," the Canaan of the young man's pilgrimage, and that entire success should ultimately follow such a scheme,-all this may indeed show, as Sir Lawrence has observed, "the power of selfreliance and industry over fortune;-that a man is faber fortunæ sua;"--but surely this is not all. For what a Canaan,—what a Promised Land, was Peel's! With talents, not of the highest order, indeed, but high among those of the second class; with the best education that money could procure and industry appropriate; with great wealth, from his earliest manhood to his death, and with entire command over his own time, what might not Sir Robert Peel have done, if, like Arthur Wellesley, he had never thought or cared about what he might become? The state of the venerable institutions of Great Britain-even now still clogged with many foulnesses-was, at the opening of his public life, so exceedingly corrupt and out of joint, that he might, if he had chosen, have become, out of office, the greatest legislative benefactor that England had ever known. But the unfortunate lesson which had been taught him from youth,-to aim at the premiership, clung to him through life. Not from the meaner motives which sometimes actuate needy men, but simply from ambition, we find him, from the first, intriguing for power. Upward he springs, till he reaches, at last, "the Promised Land.” But what is the practical issue; what the enjoyment? Does it not resemble that of Milton's fallen angels:

"They, fondly thinking to allay

Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit

Chewed bitter ashes"?

Or, if it be thought a more seemly comparison, might he not truly say, with "the Preacher,"

"I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit"?

This is a practical lesson which it is more than ever needful to urge; for the evil is apparent on every side. Statesmen, of all classes, seem to think, as the Peels, elder and younger, thought,— that office,—that power,―is a worthy object of ambition, irrespective of the great ends to which that power might be applied. They have improved, indeed, since the days of the first three Georges, in respect to the grosser and meaner motives; for we may hope and believe that few of our leading men in modern times are actuated by a sordid desire for the pecuniary gains of office. But the elevated position, the imperial authority wielded by a British minister, these are still coveted, sought after, intrigued for, even by men whose conduct, when in office, gives rise to a suspicion, that they have "no genuine and earnest convictions," no plans or purposes, in fact, beyond the mere personal aggrandisement which high office gives, and the pleasure which is derived from the prostration of all around them. Perhaps, with those who have no thoughts or interests fixed upon aught beyond the present life, all this is inevitable. But to those who aspire to something beyond a butterfly-existence, we may point to the education of Robert Peel as a grand mistake, and to his whole career as a beacon rather than an example.

QUERY ON ACTS xш. 17-21.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

SIR, I have been for some time past amusing myself with investigations into Scripture Chronology. Will you pardon my applying to you, or through you to some of your able correspondents, for a translation of the Greek of Acts xiii. 17—21. My own belief is that our English version is in error, when it says, "He gave them judges about the space of 450 years." The dative will not, I think, bear that construction; and the words can only apply to the commencement (not the duration) of the period of government by Judges. Griesbach, I see, gives a various reading, which places the words " Καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα,” &c., after “ ὡς ἔτεσι τετραKoolois Kal TEVTÝKOVтa," making the "450 years" refer to the division of the land, and not to the Judges at all. If your correspondents consider that our version is tenable, I must bow to their decision; if not, one great difficulty in the way of bible chronology will be removed. St. Paul will not have condemned our present reading, 1 Kings vi. 1.

وو

Pardon the liberty I am taking in addressing you, and believe, sir, your very obedient servant,

WALTER L. BROWN.

Wendlebury Rectory, Bicester, Sept. 4, 1860.

P.S. The division of the land by Joshua in the seventh year from his entrance into it, would be about 450 years from the birth of Isaac. 405 to the Exode + 40 to the crossing of the Jordan + 7. = 452. Or if the Exodus is assumed as the end of the "400 years," Gen. xv. 13, the division will have been 447 years from the commencement of that period; in either case near enough to justify St. Paul's expression.

LITURGICAL MUSIC.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

SIR,-I trust that in offering a few lines on the subject of Sacred Music, I shall not seem to have undervalued the very sound and judicious remarks which appeared in your Number for June last, in a review of the Rev. Mr. Young's "Morning Service;" nor, indeed, those which form the substance of the introductory essay in that little manual. Every work has its own limits. I am comfortably persuaded, therefore, that as neither the subject itself, nor your readers' interest in it can have been then and there exhausted, so neither will the author nor his reviewer feel any way disparaged by what I am desirous of further contributing. The matter is one of great intrinsic moment. It has been long neglected. It is now everywhere pressed on our notice. And there exist, yet, the most ominous diversities of opinion and of effort regarding it. It is high time that it be, at least, thoroughly ventilated.

To escape, then, from further preliminaries, it is a wonderful fact-if indeed it can be a fact, for it is all but incredible, though musical authorities concur in asserting it-that all ancient music, sacred and secular-the music, that is to say, of which we read such marvels in Holy Scripture, and the music of which the very fables of Orpheus and Arion are, properly interpreted, the most indubitable testimony-that all this music, I say, so highly prized, so profoundly studied, so eloquent in moving men's hearts and minds, so associated with all that was spirit-stirring in matters of deepest interest and significancy,—was after all, devoid of that harmony we are now taught to hold as so essential, that it had no "concord of sweet sounds" made up of notes of different pitch, but owed all its emphasis to the pure force of rhythm and accent, and the mysterious magic of melody.

It is, further, a wonderful fact—and as to this there can be no possible doubt that when from out the desolations of barbarism, and the traditional practice of the early church, men began seriously to construct, for professedly religious purposes, that particular system out of which, by painful effort, all modern music has been framed and fashioned, the music so first constructed was no less, characteristically, though not absolutely, devoid of melody; depending for whatever power it possessed upon that very concurrence of diverse but accordant sounds of which ancient music is said to have been regardless; sounds, or chords, as we now call them, occurring, it is true, in a certain consecutive order, but that order suggested by purely acoustical relationship, and not by those finer and more potent, but less explicable principles with which we are so happily familiar under the name of melody or tune.

It is, further, a fact no less wonderful, that whilst this purely harmonic type was retained, with more or less, but still as regards our present object, very little of modification through all the successive stages by which what in certain quarters is exclusively styled "church music" was developed and perfected; those times, places, and exercises in which this characteristically harmonic and non-melodic music obtained, were, broadly speaking, times, places and exercises of comparatively little true devotional fervour; so much so, that it may be even maintained that the music became more harmonious as the devotion became less fervent.

Further, yet it is a wonderful fact that, whilst this characteristically harmonic and almost mechanical "church music" was gradually rising, as its advocates affirm, to perfection amongst ourselves, through all the corresponding stages of religious lethargy and formalism in the national church-that is to say, throughout the reigns of James the First, Charles the First, Charles the Second, and James the Second,-there was developing, here at home in our English madrigals, but especially abroad in the dramas sacred and secular, (instinct, both of them alike, with the popular life on which they hung) a gradual, unconscious, but most unequivocal return to the ancient power of rhythm and melody; not, indeed, to the professed exclusion, but, more or less, to the proportionate actual neglect of harmony,-the melody first faintly mingled with it, then nobly sustained by it, at length so comparatively regardless of it as to become by degrees unsubstantial and incur reproach.

And, lastly, it is a wonderful fact that, when, in the days of Whitfield and Wesley, a sudden impulse of returning spiritual life began to manifest itself and spread abroad, there was in the very music everywhere connected with the movement a precisely simultaneous and corresponding process. The Madans, Milgroves, and other composers of new tunes to the new hymns, betraying, all of them, in sacred things, that sense of melody and that comparative insensibility to harmony which had so distinctly revealed themselves in worldly, in exact proportion as life and

passion, or at least the cognizable expression of them had stirred men's instincts and filled their hearts.

I say, all these are wonderful facts. They are no less significant. Ere I proceed, however, to interpret them, I must make a remark or two upon my statement of them.

It will, of course, be understood that we take them in a relative rather than an absolute sense. Human nature constitutes everywhere so complicated a machinery, that few statements can be made regarding it which do not involve some qualification. The facts before us must be taken, each in its own degree and its own sense. We can scarce believe that the music of the ancients had absolutely no harmony. We do not affirm that that of Tallis, Bird, and Palestrina had absolutely no melody. Nor do we accept as absolute the complaint of good John Bunyan, that in his time "all who loved the spirit of prayer were in the jail, and all who loved its form at the ale-house." All this does not invalidate the force of the several facts as I have stated them; nor make them the less capable of historic proof, philosophic analysis, and instructive inference.

There are, in sober truth, certain undeniable and pregnant facts, gathered thus, to the best of my ability, in a collective form, that bring us in, from different quarters and under diverse aspects, the same substantial report. Of ancient music I will say no more at present, save to observe, that the Ambrosian was substantially founded on it. But be it distinctly observed and carefully remembered, that whilst the Ambrosian, (thus a particular usage of the ancient music,) kept the godly together and consoled them in troublous times, and that in such manner that St. Augustine has told us it was the happy instrument of his own conversion, the Gregorian, which was substituted for it, and became through various changes the source of all our modern music, was stigmatized by our good Reformers as "piping, singing, chaunting, and playing upon the organ ;" and that, by the very men who did all they could to encourage psalmody; and that, further down, in the days of Wesley, as it had been in those of the Puritans, those who least relished, or rather the most impatiently regarded, the ecclesiastical style of music thus lineally descended from pope Gregory, were just those who were earning everywhere the honourable title of "psalm singers." I might come lower down still. know that, of those to whom I am this moment addressing myself, nine out of every ten who take a real interest in music, whether in the domestic circle or in the psalms and hymns of the sanctuary, are purely indifferent, if not actually averse, did they but put the matter fairly to issue, in regard to the chanted " service," and the accompanying organ.

We

"When I remember my tears at my conversion under the melody of thy church." (Confessions of St. Augustine, Books IX. and X.)

† Homily II., "On the place and time of prayer."