The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1850-09-10 00:00:00

e3es; 'fiat after

1 friends

nd the corpc

t to go so o
nted"

ration.
ften to
by the

i to "CU

is surplice at ftirrral ,
Lr it when he mef a corpße
one was requested to read a
rrnon • one was desired to
)ody of the church ; he was

not doing so, and the mayor m

one wai
treatm E
himself
tribute(

bailiffs
to pay

elling him ; one clergyman was
lr of a comely and seemly length,

iamanin

one was, very properly, presented for cutting
the great thorn" growing in the churchyard ; and
; so much dissatisfied, either with his living or'his
nt, that it is recorded of him that " he conveyed
away without leave-taking !" Liverpool con-
I to the cost of a peal of bells at Walton ; and the
vere ordered to be diligent in collecting all fines,
or a peal of bells in Liverpool. That necessary
e church, the clerk, was at one time paid
ills on corn ; then he had to collect his fees
• he was required to ring the cerfew
-- • and was ordered to

appendage of ti
out of t
from do
bell ate

lit o'clock every evenirn

be diligent in

his fees.—
THE

i. was allowed to the clerk of 'Walton Church for
—Baines's History of Liverpool.

OF ENEEn.---Fraser's Magazine for the
present month has a clever, pungent introductory chapter
to what we anticipate will prove a good moral satire,
entitled " The Age of Veneer." We make the following
extract :—" At present, the successful practitioners of
the art of veneering are rampant. The average modern
Englishman (we speak not of exceptions) is becoming
superficial and unreal in everything. In mind and body
he is veneered. By a skin-deep adoption of the outward
signs and shows of excellence, he thinks to pass for the
more perfect being which, we will do him the justice to
say, he aspires to be. No doubt it is in some respeCts a
noble desire of his, but the means are ignoble. Nor is it
possible thus to ignore all the conditions of culture and
development. You cannot suddenly convert a boor into
a gentleman ; you cannot, by merely telling a people that
they are chanced, transform them from coarseness of
taste, and an almost exclusive admiration of the merely

physical, into virtuosi, men of science, adepts in litera-
ture,l and patrons of, and participators in, the arts. on
cannot, by the magic of mere hope or assertion, dissemi-
nate among the middle and lower classes the tastes, habits,
and means of enjoyment, hitherto exclusively possessed
by an aristocracy. It is well to try ; but it is better to
begin with small certainties, and go on by degrees.
Otherwise you will only cover society with a crust or
varnish, hiding but corruption and premature decay.
You cannot achieve great reformatory results without
time and progresi. Yet such is the miracle this age is
bent on working. The original materials of the national
character being too coarse, and too little ornamental, you
borrow the aid of outside show. The modern John Bull
is veneered in toto. He is veneered in his political,
religious, and economical ideas and principles ; for all his
new ones, at least, are only skin-deep, adopted without
due inquiry, and paraded for show in the eyes of man-
kind. He is veneered in his new-born patronage of the
;n music, of which, as a science, he has no concep-
-;nt of taste not knowing good from bad ;

in painting, of which he much affects a love, but neglects
the simple sterling beauties of his own school for mon-
strous exaggerations, the work of men as tasteless as
himself ; in sculpture, which he takes blindly upon trust.
In his scientific knowledge (except where there is a spe-
ciality) he is essentially veneered ; being taught that he
can skin over his illogical intellect with vague theory shot
with technicalities, and that he can cram into a mere
corner of his mind a general acquaintance with all, when
any one is enough to exhaust a being's whole 111 e. And
so we might go on running the fanciful parallel ad infini-
tum. He is born under a veneered constitution, receives
a veneered education, and passes his life amid a very
corrupt social system, veneered over with noble pretexts
of morality. He lives in a stuccoed house—or fragile
structure of rotten timber and porous bricks, faced with
the real stuff ; he sits on veneered chairs, in veneered
garments ; and he eats off veneered mahogany, with
electrotyped plate. He imbibes with his breakfast his
day's opinions from leading articles, the ne plus ultra of
veneering and criticisms which do not even pretend to be
anything but superficial ; and he passes his social hours
in the midst of a veneered gaiety and refinement, and a
still moreflagrantly veneered hospitality. In his death,
as in his life, h e is equally ostentatious and deceptive, for
he is buried in a joint-stock burial ground, a sort of
veneered imitation of the solemnity of ancient sepulture.