132 .13' AMERICAN FARMER IX EXGLAND. 



a few benches. Under the organ loft were elevated armed seats, 

 which were occupied indiscriminately by the unofficiating clergy 

 and military officers in uniform ; the governor of the castle ; Lord 

 Grosvenor (as " colonel of the militia"), Lord de Tapley, and 

 others. Stationing soldiers among the canons, it struck us, was 

 well enough for a joke, but objectionable as part of a display of 

 worshiping the God of Peace.* 



Half way between these elevated seats and the chancel was 

 the reading desk and pulpit, and on each side of this the choris- 

 ters were seated. Several persons rose to offer us their seats as 

 we approached them, and when we were seated, placed prayer- 

 books before us. The pews were all furnished with foot-stools, 

 or hassocks of straw rope, made up hi the manner of a straw bee- 

 hive. 



Much of the service, which in our churches is read, was sung, 

 or, as they say, intoned. Intoning is what, in school-children, is 

 called " sing-song" reading, only the worst kind, or an exaggera- 

 ted sing-song. I had never heard it before in religious service, 

 except hi a mitigated way from some of the old-fashioned Quaker 

 and Methodist female exhorters, and I was surprised to hear it 

 among the higher class of English clergy, and for a moment per- 

 plexed to account for it. But I remembered that nearly all men, 

 in reading Scripture, or in oral prayer, or in almost any public 

 religious exercises, use a very different tone and mode of utter- 

 ance from that which is usual or natural with them, either in 

 conversation or in ordinary reading. And this is more noticeable 

 in persons of uncultivated minds ; so it is probably an impulse to 



* I remember when I was a child, seeing on the Sunday preceding the first Monday in 

 May the annual training day in one of the most old-fashioned villages in Connecticut, 

 the officers of the militia come into the meeting-house in their uniforms. The leader of 

 the choir was a corporal, and the red stripes on his pantaloons, the red facings and bell- 

 buttons of his coat, as he stood up alone and pitched the psalm tunes, was impressed 

 irretrievably on my mind. 



