Most of us are aware that, at intervals during the last three centuries, efforts have been made by well-meaning persons to realise the pathetic dream of a re-united Church, something not quite Protestant and not quite Catholic, based upon those principles of compromise which are so dear to the English heart. But none of them, I suppose, has ever been made with so little appreciation of the facts, so quaint a misunderstanding of values, as that described by its author in a book entitled ‘Journal of a Tour in Italy in 1850,’ by George Townsend, D.D., Canon of Durham, published by Messrs. Rivington in 1851. I am suspected, I do not know why, of being infected with that April Fool’s Day spirit which delights to palm off literary frauds on the public. Let me explain, then, that the volume really exists, and that my quotations are all genuine. Nor let it be supposed that I am the victim, any more than I am the author, of an imposture. Canon Townsend has his niche in the Dictionary of National Biography; he is no fiction of a Tractarian humorist, he is solid fact. A visit to Durham might even supply us with his portrait, but I have felt the pilgrimage to be unnecessary. I think I see the old gentleman well enough as it is; white-chokered, well-tailored, earnest, whiskered after the fashion of his time. He had got his canonry, I suppose, before 1840, and was not therefore affected by the findings of the Ecclesiastical Commission, which cut down its value to a beggarly thousand a year; he liked, clearly, to do himself well, and was not infected with the enthusiasm of the Evangelicals.