c our Church has got, and does not use; we are content to
have our hymn-manuals stuffed with the sort of music which, merging the
distinction between sacred and profane, seems designed to make the
worldly man feel at home, rather than to reveal to him something of the
life beyond his knowledge; compositions full of cheap emotional effects
and bad experiments made to be cast aside, the works of the purveyors of
marketable fashion, always pleased with themselves, and always to be
derided by the succeeding generation.

Example is better than precept; and my own venture as a compiler of a
hymn-book has made it possible for me to say much that otherwise I should
not have said. In _The Yattendon Hymnal_, printed by Mr. Horace Hart at
the Clarendon Press, Oxford, and to be had of Mr. Frowde, price 20_s._,
will be found a hundred hymns with their music, chosen for a village
choir. The music in this book will show what sort of a hymnal might be
made on my principles, while the notes at the end of the volume will
illustrate almost every point in this essay which requires illustration,
besides many others. As a complement to this essay and for advertisement
of the Hymnal I here give the prefaces of that book, which are as
follows:--

[1]_Confess._ ix. 6.

[2]_Ibid._ ix. 7.

[3]This is perhaps rather a quality proper to the sensation.

[4]'Et vix eis praebeo congruentem [locum].' which might only mean 'I
cannot find the right place for them.'

[5]_Confess._ x. 13.

[6]St. Augustin does not allow that a vague emotion can be religious; it
must be directed. Few would agree to this.

[7]I assume 'favourite hymn' to mean a sung hymn. The interest of the
record must lie in its being of a heightened emotion of the same kind
as that described by St. Augustin in his own case, _What tears I shed_,
&c.

[8]It was not an uncommon practice on the Continent (say from 1540 to
1840), to print books of hymns to be sung to the current secular airs;
and the names or first lines of these airs were set above the
hymn-words as the musical direction. M. Douen, in his _Clement Marot et
le Psautier Huguenot_, vol. i, ch. 22, has given an account of some of
these books; and any one who wishes to follow this branch of the
subject may read his chapter. He does not notice the later Italian
_Laude Spirituali_, which might have supplied incredible monsters to
his museum.

[9]Besides, the main fault of these books, from