and nobody can say whether it manifests these distinctive marks from that which it has, or from that which it wants. Upon the whole, it is, or may be, one of the snuggest houses in Europe; but sometimes with an ugly number of windows, when the taxes come a-paying. It is occasionally splendid, and generally genteel; but here and there it is not quite handsome enough. It has sometimes a green field before it, in keeping with the station and taste of its occupier; like a cow's pasture about the door of two maiden sisters. A country manse is not a mansionhouse, a jointure-house, or a farm-house, far less is it a cottage or a castle; yet it has something more or less of each, and all of these strangely blended. In a word, it must, out and in, be described by itself. It is a manse exactly like itself, - and that is like nothing anywhere else. In a country town it is sometimes jammed up into a confined, dark, and dirty corner, elbowed in with the churchyard, the fore street, the back lane, and the midden dubs. Here nothing is to be seen over the minister's wall but half the windows of the village staring you in the face; and nothing is to be heard but the noise of the weaver's shuttle, and the chap chapping of Souter Johnnie's hammer, varied, in the distance, with the more musical ring from the black brawny arm of the village smith.

"Next comes the minister, whose piety, learning, and worldly wisdom the whole parish admires. He is the gravitating power which binds the mass of parochial society in one lump. He is the magnetic pole to which all classes of the population point. He is the connecting link in the galvanic chain which conveys the fruits of sympathy, kindness, and care, from the rich to the poor, and which inculcates and reconveys gratitude and respect from the poor back to the wealthy. He is alike useful to all ranks, high and low. He gives the poor their last consolation in misery, and he offers the rich their only motives to restrain them from vice. He is a man of no rank, just because he is thus a man of every rank. He is, therefore, to be found the one day seated at the board of the peer, and the other on the dim and smoky bedside of the dying pauper. Every day in the week he is uniformly in the midst of all the scenes of severe or sudden sorrow. On Sabbath he is the pathetic, the pious, and the powerful preacher. His prayers in public and in private, his preaching and general observation, are, even in our degenerate age, far more influential than the general cast of thought, which, by prudence and a little activity, he silently controls, even in spite of the ferocious delirium of the Voluntary and Radical Press.

"There is next the minister's better half, and she is general

ly so, in every sense of the expression; for a minister may be either rich or poor, happy or unhappy, popular or the reverse in his parish, to a very great extent indeed, exactly as his wife chooses. Nay, in everything within the compass of her experience, tèn to one but she gives a sounder advice than the minister will take. There may not, in every case, be a great depth of learning and philosophy, but there often is a quick and just perception of the prudent and proper thing to be done; and the man is a fool who does not allow his wife to guide and guard him oftener than he lets wit. No lady has so important a part to act in so vast a variety of stations. Let nothing be mentioned of the mere domestic duties of a wife and mother,which no Christian woman looks down upon; she ought always to be as much of the lady as her neighbors generally are. She must be able to take her station, with ease and confidence, at the head of her own table. She must be often in her own kitchen to direct the cooking, and to take a peep into the scullery. She must see sometimes how the cream is managed in the milkhouse. She may even step to the threshold of the byre door, — taking care of her feet of course, to let the servant know that she can notice whether the cows be properly attended to. Besides her duties at the manse, she must make her rounds in the parish with whatever she can spare from her stores, and, alas! that it should be so little, of cordials, clothing, or medicine and meal. What she can't spare of her own, she can sometimes obtain from the treasures of the rich. And in this way she may be of immense service, not only to the community, but to her husband, in helping him to discharge some of the usual duties of his office.

"Then there is the minister's man, who, besides being an oracle in the parish, must be at the manse, complete of his kind, and without a flaw. Like Sampson Carrasco, he must be sound of body, strong of limb, a silent sufferer of heat and cold, hunger and thirst, and endowed with more than those qualifications which are requisite in the squire of a knight-errant. He must have a good temper, and be patient of reproof. He must combine, in his own person, the offices of steward, ploughman, carter, cattlekeeper, gardner, and, it is said, in some parishes, of bellman, gravedigger, and precentor. He must be able to sow, and put up stacks, to thatch on an occasion, and to build up dikes any day in the year, when they happen to tumble down. In short, he too must be a servant of all work, and do everything that can occur at a manse, and that is more than happens at the house of proprietor, tenant, or cottar. In addition to all this, the servant-man, in some cases, becomes a sort of

truth, a kind of For forty or fifty

confidential adviser, a companion, and, in master over the aged and once active pastor. years they may have been united in one interest. They may both have grown gray about the manse, and intend, as a mere matter of course, to breathe their last within the precincts of the glebe. "It would be tiresomely minute to tell what is required of the servants in the kitchen; the duties of dairy, and cook, and cattle-maid, are to be combined in one individual; and of house, table, and nursery-maid in another. And then the bit laddie' must be herd and stable boy, boots, waiter, and runner to the post-office.

"But a paragraph must be given to the well-known and most useful of all four-footed animals about a manse,— the minister's one horse, which is perhaps a greater anomaly than any already mentioned. He must be, and he generally is, a paragon of a horse. He must contain, within the compass of his own individual person, the whole perfections proper to his species, to fit him for that universality of employment to which he is daily destined. He must unite four horses in one body at least. He must be a saddle-horse, a gig-horse, and a cart and ploughhorse all combined, thus uniting gentility, agility, docility, and strength. He must have something of stature and symmetry, with a good cargo of bones compactly put together. He must be hardy, not only to endure fatigue and fasting too, but to stand heats and colds, and every variety of stable accommodation. He must not kick, bite, or eat saddles when standing in the same stall with a neighbor. He must have a firm step, and good eyes in the dark; and he must not be too sensitive to either whip or spur. The variety, indeed, of his occupations for any one week of the year, it is almost ridiculous to enumerIn the words of the late Lord Meadowbank, he is to be regarded as one of the essentialia of the situation of a clergyman,' without which he can scarcely discharge any one of the most important of his sacred functions. Without his horse the minister cannot visit his parishoners, or his presbytery, or the schools in the district, or the synod of the bounds. But not only does he require to carry the minister on his back, but he must drag, at times, the whole family in a drosky, in shape, bulk, and weight, something akin to the picture, in Reading made Easy,' of Noah's Ark, or to the more useful and humble Whitechapel cart, not unlike a machine used in our cities for watering the streets. He must not only be a plough-horse, but he should be able, at times, almost alone, to draw the plough, because it is not every day in the year that he can marrow with the horse of a good neighbor, possessed, in like manner,

ate.

of a

little farm and a solitary beast.' He must not only bring home crops and coals to the manse, but, on great emergencies, in hay-time and harvest, he must be a drudge to all the little occupants of land in the vicinity." pp. 9-13.

The description thus given of the manse, differs in many respects from what would be true of one of our country minister's establishments. The chapter on Income is too local in its bearing, too much about teinds, teind courts, factors and heritors, commissioners of teinds, servitudes of peat, feal, and divot, &c., to be of much service or interest to us. But as soon as the author gets fairly within the manse, things wear a new face. His chapter on Economics hardly opens before he runs a tilt against the old bachelors. A wife is necessary to true

economy.

"Take a thought, and mend,' is the first, the last, and the only hint in clerical economy to be given to the confirmed bachelor. But who is a confirmed bachelor, and where is he to be found? He is that solitary, melancholic, and monkish man, which is the most to be pitied of all living beings at the manse. But take his own word for it, and the confirmed bachelor is no more to be met with than a mermaid is; for nobody takes the compliment to himself, or will allow it to be given to him. While the matter is doubtful, and so long as a gleam of hope tells the flattering tale of joys never to come, the gray-haired squire boasts of the appellation, and plays off his jokes with dexterity in defence of his own order; but ask the unmarried man of fourscore years, How old art thou? and he will blink the question. Advise him to marry, and he will admit that he has not given up thoughts of it; and above any, he is the most earnest in urging his young friends to take a wife.

"But whether you be a confirmed bachelor, or one merely for a year or two by a concurrence of untoward circumstances, the word of command is- Go marry, Sir, and know, before you die, what the words Comfort, and kindly feelings, and clerical economy mean. Be selfish and recluse no longer, but give your affections, and a portion of your worldly means, to one who will double your joys, and divide all your sorrows. Instead of misspending these on birds, cats, and dogs, great and small, black, white, and spotted, select an object more worthy of it than fourfooted animals and creeping things. Instead of yawning over a book as your dumb and daily companion, smile rather on the faces of a blooming and joyous family, as the only way to make home a place of rest and happiness. Furnish your manse as you may, with easy chairs, sofas, and settees, have a vapor, a VOL. XXXIV. -3D S. VOL. XVI. NO. II. 29

shower, and a plunge bath, cold, warm, or tepid, have a snug porch, and a green door, with a fawn light, and a stove in the lobby, with a flue of heated air up the main stair-case to the top, — have a roaring fire in the parlor every morning before breakfast, with all sorts of antique fire-screens, large and little, have a fiddle, a solitaire, a tobacco pipe, or a set of stockingwires, to vary your occupations, - when you go for an hour to snuff up the east wind, put on your cork soles, overalls, and dreadnought, go to bed at midnight, or long after it, and rise far on in the afternoon, when the day has been well aired ; have all this, and four times more, but still, my good friend, so long as you want THE WIFE, there is a coldness, a formality, and a prim correct sort of bachelorism in the whole affair, which, happily, is never to be found when there are three or four boys romping about.

"Children may occasion many cares, but without them there are few real comforts. Little children are as arrows in the hands of a mighty man. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them. He shall not be ashamed, but shall speak with the enemies in the gate.' * * *

"But the question occurs, Who should a minister marry? One somewhat of a minister's own station in life and age? Most undoubtedly. —With money? Yes, as a mean, but not as an end. A wife who brings one hundred pounds a-year, and spends two, is not a profitable bargain. One penny in the wife is often better than two with her. A wife of your own flock? It may do tolerably well if the minister be endowed, and the lady wealthy; but otherwise, it often proves hazardous. Above and beyond every thing, don't let the minister of a royal burgh cleave unto an old residenter in his own town. If he does, he will not have his sorrows to seek, inasmuch as he will find himself harnessed at once and for ever to every clishmaclaver for the last fifty years, to all the family feuds within the royalty, and to all the personal and party politics of a small constituency.

"Samson, we are told, went down to Timnath, and saw a woman of Timnath, of the daughters of the Philistines; and he came up and told his father and his mother, and said, 'I have seen a woman in Timnath, of the daughters of the Philistines; now therefore get her for me to wife. Then his father and mother said unto him, Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines? And Samson said unto his father, Get her for me, for she pleaseth me well.' Samson got her accordingly, and everybody knows what were the consequences. On this matter Henry observes, 'that the nego