_St. Antholin's Parish Books._--In common with many of your antiquarian
readers, I look forward with great pleasure to the selection from the
entries in the St. Antholin's Parish Books, which are kindly promised by
their present guardian, and, I may add, intelligent expositor, "W.C."
St. Antholin's is, on several accounts, one of the most interesting of
our London churches; it was here, Strype tells us (_Annals_, I. i. p.
199.), "the new morning prayer," i.e., according to the new reformed
service-book, first began in September, 1559, the bell beginning to ring
at five, when a psalm was sung after the Geneva fashion, all the
congregation, men, women, and boys, singing together. It is much to be
regretted that these registers do not extend so far back as this year,
as we might have found in them entries of interest to the Church
historian; but as "W.C." tells us the volumes are kept regularly up to
the year 1708, I cannot but hope he may be able to produce some notices
of what Mr. P. Cunningham calls, "the Puritanical fervour" of this
little parish. "St. Antling's bell," and "St. Antling's preachers," were
proverbial for shrillness and prolixity, and the name is a familiar one
to the students of our old dramatists. Let "W.C." bear in mind, that the
chaplains of the Commissioners of the Church of Scotland, with Alexander
Henderson at their head, preached here in 1640, commanding crowded
audiences, and that a passage was formed from the house where they
lodged into a gallery of this church; and that the pulpit of St.
Antholin's seems, for many years, to have been the focus of schism,
faction, and sedition, and he may be able to bring forward from these
happily preserved registers much interesting and valuable information.