216 KIDDERMINSTER.

managed for aught I know, but nobody thinks of it except with a deep-rooted feeling of injustice, especially among the middle classes. I believe the foundation or town boys do not number more than half a dozen. The two masters are clergymen, and both highly accomplished. The old chantry has been restored to its original state, at the cost of Earl Dudley, and is now used as a Sunday School; * III, St. George's Church, erected in 1821-2, at a cost of nearly £20,000 ; an immense building, tolerably sightly for that period, accommodating upwards of 2,000 persons; recently ornamented with a fine east window, an eagle lectern, and a magnificent carved reredos, the latter at the expense chiefly of Messrs. Brinton and Lewis; IV, St. John's Church, at Woodfield, built in 1842, at a cost of about £4,000; decidedly not worth a visit to see, yet it has more than 1,200 sittings, and must therefore not be despised, utility being the main consideration in a populous town like this; V, Dissenting chapels: Unitarian, Independents, Baptists, Lady Huntingdon's, Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, and Roman Catholic chapel and schools dedicated to St. Ambrose. The Roman Catholic chapel at Leswell was erected in 1858 on the site of an old one; it cost nearly £2,500, and will seat about 600 persons. Dissent took up its quarters at Kidderminster as early as anywhere. Poor Baxter, when he occupied the pulpit of the parish church, was terribly worried by the Quakers. He never shyed a disputation, but these red-hot broad-brims would enter his church, challenge him out as a deceiver of the people, follow him home, and make his house and pulpit so hot that he was at length compelled to send some of them to prison. Others were put in the stocks there for travelling on the Sabbath-day (to preach). Baxter had found his parishioners "very ignorant, irreligious, and dissolute;" and although he himself did a great work in the place, there

* There is a relic (probably ecclesiastical) of ancient Kidderminster under the Clarence Inn, Coventry Street, apparently a crypt or subterranean chapel, of Norman architecture.