CHAPTER I. LEVITICAL. Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good. But not of late years are we about to speak; we are going back to the beginning of this century; late years-present years are dusty, sun-burnt, hot, arid; we will evade the noon, forget it in siesta, pass the mid-day in slumber, and dream of dawn. If you think, from this prelude, that any thing like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melo-drama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something as unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not" positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps toward the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic-ay, even an Anglo-Catholic-might eat on Good Friday in Passion Week: it shall be cold lentiles and vinegar without oil; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs and no $ oast lamb. Of late years, I say, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England; but in eighteen-hundred-eleven-twelve that affluent rain had not descended: curates were scarce then there was no Pastoral Aid-no Additional Curates' Society to stretch a helping hand to worn-out old rectors and incumbents, and give them the wherewithal to pay a vigorous young colleague from Oxford or Cambridge. The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusey and tools of the Propaganda, were at that time being hatched under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery-baptism in wash-hand-basins. You could not have guessed by looking at any one of them that the Italianironed double frills of its net cap surrounded the brows of a pre-ordained, specially-sanctified successor of St. Paul, St. Peter, or St. John; nor could you have foreseen in the folds of its long night-gown, the white surplice in which it was hereafter cruelly to exercise the souls of ts parishioners, and strangely to nonplus its old-fashioned vicar by flourishing aloft in a pulpit, the shirt-like raiment which had never before waved higher than the reading-desk. Yet even in those days of scarcity there were curates: the precious plant was rare, but it