Church Services. SONNING PARISH CHURCH. Sundays, 11 o'clock in the Morning. 3 o'clock in the Afternoon. Half-past 6 o'clock in the Evening. Saints' Days and Festivals, II o'clock in the Morning. The Holy Communion is administered on the first Sunday in the month in the usual Morning Service, and on the third Sunday in the month, at 8 o'clock in the Morning, and on all the great festivals. ALL SAINTS' CHURCH. Sundays, 11 o'clock in the Morning. Half-past 3 o'clock in the Afternoon. Holy Communion on the 1st and 3rd Sundays in each month, and on the great festivals. Holy Baptism is administered at Sonning Church, and at All Saints', on the second Sunday in the month in the Afternoon Service. It is particularly requested that children may be brought to be Baptized on this Sunday only, unless there is some urgent reason for choosing another time, when due notice must be given beforehand. The Churching of Women will be immediately before any of the Services. THE FOLLOWING HYMNS WILL BE SUNG AT Coals delivered in Sonning, Woodley, and Oxfordshire. £49 6 4 RECOLLECTIONS OF A JOURNEY ON THE CONTINENT IN 1867.-II. Travellers complain of the ugliness of the country between Boulogne and Amiens. No doubt it is most uninteresting: large level fields, long straight roads, and canals almost as straight, lined with rows of formal poplar trees, houses for the most part few and far between, not gathered into snug little villages as in England; these certainly are not cheering sights. But it would be most unfair to condemn France, (which many do), as an ugly country, from the specimen of a single tract such as this. The fact is, that in France varieties of scenery succeed each other much less rapidly than in England. In the course of a ten miles' drive in our own England. you may pass from a flat to a hilly region, cross open heaths, thread narrow hedgerow lanes, bordered sometimes by the field, sometimes by the wood or copse; and a short railway journey will take you from the fens and flats of Lincolnshire into the dales of Yorkshire, from the sluggish stream of the Trent or the Ouse to the dashing mountain beck. But France is on a larger scale, and you must travel greater distances before such changes occur; to exchange the peaty marsh for the swelling heath or down, flat, or undulating arable and pasture land for wooded hills or actual mountains, you must go fifty or one hundred miles in France, whereas in England perhaps a journey of thirty or forty or even less would be sufficient. Hence, if you get on the top of a tower or hill in France you may generally see a great stretch of the same kind of scenery; and you feel that you are in a much larger country than England, on a continent not in an Island. And now to speak of Amiens. It is a very good sample of a French provincial town. That taste for uniformity and precision in their arrangements, which has been already noticed as distinctive of the French, appears in the construction of their towns. In some respects nearly all are laid out on the same plan; each has some kind of public walk. generally near the entrance of the town, set out with formal rows of trees; each has an open space where troops parade, often with a garden in the centre where the band plays; each has a barrack, and a rather pretentious white house with a tricoloured flag hanging in front, where dwells the mayor or prefect; each has some little museum or gallery of pictures; the streets are often narrow and winding, but the houses are much more regular in height, and similar in general construction than in English towns, where, (as in Reading,) every man builds what is right in his own eyes. The larger houses and the hotels are built round courts, which you enter from the street by an archway; the driver of your omnibus from the station as he passes under the archway, sharply cracks his whip to announce that he has brought back treasure in the shape of passengers. Then out run the neat little waiters in their little round jackets, and their little white aprons, and seize upon your handbags and bundles, and out run the porters in their blouses and haul down your baggage from the roof, and the landlord seeing English travellers, who will order much, and pay high for it, stands smiling and rubbing his hands in the back-ground. Part of the rice court of the Hotel du Rhin at Amiens is laid out as a garden, in which are kept a stork and gulls and other birds. Several times have we been to this hotel, at the beginning or ending of a happy journey, and there is the stork, now quite an old friend, stalking about the garden in his grave and delicate way; he doesn't greet you certainly with any signs of pleasure, but still there he is, and I confess if the stork was ever to disappear we should regard it as a very serious loss. And now for the Cathedral; and first a short comparison between French and English Cathedrals. French Cathedrals are generally much loftier in proportion to their length than the English; no Cathedral in France is so long as that of Winchester or Canterbury, no Cathedral in England is so lofty as Amiens or Beauvais. The central massive tower, so common in the English, is excessively rare in the French Cathedral; in place of the tower rises a very slender spire of open metal work, the roof is very steeply pitched, surrounded by a fringe of flying buttresses, the choir ends in an apse. Such are the points which usually arrest the eye at a distance; as you go nearer your are struck by the deeply recessed arched portals, the sides of which are crowded with figures carved in stone; at the West front there are often three and sometimes even five of these deep sculptured entrances, as at Bourges. When you get inside, the eye is made dizzy by the excessive height of the roof, and charmed by the rich tracery of great wheel windows in the transepts, and often by the gorgeous colours of painted windows, such as no modern glass can approach. On the whole, the French Cathedral strikes us as lighter, more aspiring, more ambitious in structure than the English, and more profuse in decoration, especially sculpture; the English building partakes of the character of our climate and people, it is more sombre, more simple, sometimes almost austere; its beauty consists in a just proportion of parts, and in graceful harmony of lines, more than in richness or abundance of ornament. These remarks may be fitly illustrated by the example of Amiens: from afar you see the long ridge of the steep pitched roof upheaving itself out of the forest of its surrounding pinnacles and flying buttresses: in the centre is the needle-like spire; at the West end are three huge arched portals, approached by an ample flight of stone steps, stretching along the whole front, the sides of these arches are studded with an array of colossal figures of Apostles, Saints, and Kings of France, each in his separate niche. The inside is cold compared with the exterior; there is some little resemblance to Westminster Abbey, but though loftier, it is not nearly so striking, the stone is much lighter and less venerable in appearance, and the surface of the walls between the arches and triforium is not as in the Abbey carved in diaper work; but if the Abbey has the advantage inside, Amiens far surpasses the Abbey in grandeur outside. Never could it look more divinely beautiful than as we saw it that September night about ten o'clock, the sky was perfectly serene, and the mighty mass of the Cathedral looked indescribably solemn in the moonlight, the recessed parts in deep mysterious shadow, the lofty salient parts standing out white against the black vault of the heavens. W.R.S. ST. ANDREW'S CHURCH, SONNING. III. The restoration of the Church was finally determined on in the beginning of the year 1852. The first step was the obtaining a faculty from the Bishop's Court for removing all the interior fittings of the Church. Some fears were entertained that there might be a difficulty in getting permission to remove the old faculty pews; but fortunately on the day of citation appointed for any one to go to Oxford to make objections to the issuing of the new faculty, no one appeared, and a fresh faculty was accordingly granted, empowering the Vicar and Churchwardens to remove all the existing fittings, to make any alteration in the position of the monuments, and generally to re-arrange the Church. By this faculty the whole body of the Church belongs to the parishioners, and is at the disposition of the Churchwardens, whose office it is to appropriate the seats from time to time according to their discretion. Next came the settlement of the plans, and the selection of a contractor for the works. Mr. Woodyer's plans embraced at first little more than the necessary repairs of the fabric, the cleaning of the walls, pillars, &c., and the re-seating of the Church. They were put up to tender, and the lowest estimate for the works was that of Mr. Dell, Builder, of Sonning. with whom the contract for the whole was entered into. In Easter week, 1852, two rooms in the Girls' School were fitted up as a temporary Church, and licensed by the Bishop for the celebration of public worship, and the administration of the Sacraments. Marriages were still to be performed at the Church. and several, as it turned out, were celebrated in the midst of the ruins, when there was no roof on the nave, and the roof of the chancel was open to the sky. The first part of the Burial Service during the same time was generally read in the porch. The last Services in the old Church were held on Sunday, April 18th, and on Monday morning, the 19th, the work of demolition commenced. The organ was first taken away, and in the course of little more than a week, both the galleries disappeared. It was quite astonishing to see how vast an improvement was instantly made by the removal of these obstructions, in the enlargement and lightening of the whole Church. Before long the whole area was cleared, and then began some of our difficulties. As soon as the masons came in, they began scraping the arches and pillars in different places from the coats of plaster and whitewash, and then to our dismay we found that many of the arches which we supposed to be of stone or chalk, were in fact of brick, which had been used in all the modern repairs and alterations. The arches on both sides of the nave fortunately turned out to be of chalk, but the pillars on the South side, oddly enough, were of chalk with alternate bands of brick, and anyone can still see traces of this singular arrangement in the bands of stone, which we inserted, and which now alternate with the chalk in these pillars. The chief trouble was that the three great arches, dividing the Church from the Chancel and Chancel Aisles, were of brick, as well as the three round debased arches of equal size, which then |