The convention parliament, at the restoration of Charles II., ordered the graves of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw to be broken open; the coffins were put upon hurdles and dragged to Tyburn; there being pulled out of their coffins, the mouldering bodies were hanged "at the several angles of that triple tree." "Their loathsome carcasses," as the court chronicler calls them, were thrown into a deep hole under the gallows; their heads were set upon poles on the top of Westminster Hall. (Gesta Britanniorum, at the end of Wharton's Almanac, as quoted in Harris's Life of Cromwell.) It appears that ladies went to see this odious sight. That pleasant rogue, Pepys, who had been a great Roundhead and Cromwellian, and who in his youth had proposed that the proper text for a funeral sermon upon Charles I. would be "The memory of the wicked shall rot," mentions, with seeming complacency, that his pretty wife had been abroad with my Lady Batten, "seeing it." It was just three days before these brutalities that a proclamation was read in all churches for the martyrdom of Charles I. Evelyn, who had a little more morality and decency than Pepys, though he is scarcely entitled to have the epithets of good and gentle so lavished upon him, makes this exulting entry in his diary: January 30th-"This day were the carcasses of those arch-rebels, Cromwell, Bradshaw, the judge who condemned his majesty, and Ireton, son-in-law to the usurper, dragged out of their superb tombs in Westminster Abbey among the kings, to Tyburn, and hanged on the gallows there from nine in the morning till six at night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monument in a deep pit; thousands who had seen them in all their pride being their spectators. Look back to Nov. 22d, 1658, (Oliver's funeral,) and be astonished, and fear God, and honour the king, and meddle not with them that are given to change." No. XIX.-ORGANS. Organs were common before the tenth century. St. Dunstan gave one to the Abbey of Malmesbury in the reign of Edgar, who came to the crown in 959, described in Saxon by Wulstan, a monk of Winchester in the tenth century; thus translated by Mason in an essay on instrumental church music : "Twelve pair of bellows, ranged in stated row, Are joined above and fourteen more below; These the full force of seventy men require, Whose ceaseless toils doth plenteously perspire, Each riding out till all the wind be press'd In the close confines of th' incumbent chest, On which four hundred pipes in order rise, To bellow forth the blast that chest supplies." Organs are mostly set at the west end of churches, and thus often hide a fine window sometimes they are placed in the transept of the cathedrals, and thus destroy the fine vista through the centre. I have no doubt the pipes might be so arranged as to obviate these evils. In Norway they are commonly set over the altars. I was once in a Catholic chapel in Liverpool, and saw one thus placed, with, as I thought, a very fine effect. The organ at Hanover Chapel, Regent-street, London, is placed over the altar. The one in St. Andrew's Church, Dublin, is placed behind the pulpit, and the communion-table before it. |