1831.] A/airs in General 213 



day an accommodation it has not been known to afford to any within the 

 recollection of the oldest inhabitants of the parish. It is also said, that the 

 weathercock surmounting the steeple in question is to be made to demean 

 itself more in accordance with the spirit of the present changing times, c ever 

 varying as the wind ;' for, from some cause, weighty and sufficient doubtless, 

 it has for many years seen fit to point only one way." 



The malice of this attack is incontestible. What is it to any news- 

 paper, all whose preparations and mystifications are made under cover of 

 midnight, whether the church clock is as visible as the Lord Mayor's 

 wisdom, or as invisible as the police after dusk ? It is evidently no 

 affair of theirs. The world goes goes on as well as if there were neither 

 clock nor church there, and what more can be asked ? As to the 

 money intended for the " beautifying" of this fearful evidence of modern 

 architecture, we have no doubt that it is well and wisely employed in 

 something else, and there is an end of the matter. The weather-cock 

 allusion is still more malicious. Who cares how a city weather- cock 

 turns, or what purpose does it ever answer but to fix the eye of the 

 innocent passenger while his pocket is picking? We say, let the 

 world and St. Mary alone. All is very well as it is. " Whatever is, is 

 right," especially in parish business ! 



There is a rumour that the Duke of Devonshire is about to be 

 suffered to purchase the Pimlico Palace ! and purchase it too, for 

 about a fourth of what the public have been compelled to pay for it. 

 We know not what the spirit of kings may be in this age of shaking 

 thrones ; but we know that the spirit of the nation would feel itself 

 most prodigiously surprised by any such transaction. His Grace of 

 Devonshire's pride is sufficiently bloated already, not to require any 

 addition, by being thus permitted to thrust himself into the very 

 tenement of royalty. In Buckingham House the good and venerable 

 King George the Third lived many a happy and honoured year. We 

 admit the dishonour brought upon those recollections by the architec- 

 tural abomination of Mr. Nash's structure ; but still the public money 

 built the palace, and how many farthings of that money would the 

 public have given to build a palace for the Duke of Devonshire ? The 

 sale of York House to Lord Stafford was a matter of the deepest public 

 disgust, and to this moment it is an offence to the national eye to see 

 the house intended for the lamented son of George the Third, tenanted 

 by the little canal proprietor who hides himself in it. But the sale of 

 Buckingham Palace would be a still less endurable meanness, an open 

 and degrading confession that there is nothing in England, however 

 high, secluded, or sacred, which mere vulgar weight of purse may 

 not master ; and which may not be the prize or prey of the greatest 

 miser, or coxcomb, or booby, in the realm. 



A fierce war is waging in York, in which the combatants are : Mr. 

 Vernon, the archbishop's son, one of the canons, Mr. Smirke, and their 

 followers, on the one side, and a large proportion of the gentry on the 

 other ; and the cause of the war is the removal of the famous cathedral 

 screen. The subscribers insist that the original framer of the screen 

 had more brains than MY. Vernon, and more knowledge of architecture 

 than Mr. Smirke and all his tribe, and that, besides, as they subscribed 



