The ARMENIAN CHRISTIANS entered the Persian Gulph, and opened a trade with India by sea at the port of Surat, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. They also traded by land, by way of Candahar and Cabul to Delhi, thence to Lucknow, Benares, Patna, and Bengal. Of this mercantile race an individual of considerable eminence, and an inhabitant of Ispahan named Coja Pharioos Kalender, entered into agreement with the Company for the better conduct of their mutual dealings, and obtained from them the following specific grant under their larger Seal, and which is dated June 22, 1688:

"Whenever forty or more of the Armenian nation shall become inhabitants in any of the garrisons, cities, or towns, belonging to the Company in the East Indies, the said Armenians shall not only have and enjoy the free use and exercise of their religion, but there shall be also allotted to them a parcel of ground to erect a church thereon for the worship and service of God in their own way. And that we will also at our own charge cause a convenient church to be built of timber, which afterwards the said Armenians may alter and build with stone, or other solid materials, to their own good liking. And the said Government and Company will also allow fifty pounds per annum, during the space of seven years, for the maintenance of such priest or minister as they shall choose to officiate therein. Given, &c."

Their first settlement appears to have been in the neighbourhood of Cossimbazar at Sydabad. Their next church was erected about the year 1695 at Chinsurah; another in 1724, in Calcutta, which was destroyed in 1756; and the sum of 700,000 rupees was recovered by the Armenians from the Nabob, as a compensation. They have another church at Dacca; another at Madras; another at Surat; and another at Bombay, which last mentioned is their metropolitan church, and the residence of their Bishop, who has within his jurisdiction about fourteen priests. The Armenians have uniformly enjoyed the aid and protection promised to them in the year 1688, not only according to the very letter of the Company's agreement, but far beyond it. Almost all their stone Churches have been erected by the Company, and their priests enjoy stipends from the public revenue.

The GREEKS were, as the Armenians

had been, allured to India by commerce. The first eminent Greek Christian who settled in Calcutta was ALEXIOS ARGYREE, a native of Philippopolis. He came to Bengal in 1750, and afterwards made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which acquired for him the title of Hadjee. At the close of the year 1770, Hadjee Alexios Argyree accompanied Captain Thornhill as Arabic interpreter in a voyage from Calcutta to Moca and Judda. On the 29th of December they met with a severe gale, in which the vessel was dismasted. At the moment of extreme danger, when all on board expected that the vessel must have foundered, Argyree made a solemn vow to heaven, that if they survived the threatening perils, he would found a church in Calcutta for the congregation of Greeks. The gale abated; the vessel put in and refitted at Madras, and proceeded in Feb. 1772, to Mecca, where they took in a cargo; but as the season was too far advanced for tain Thornhill dispatched Argyree the vessel to proceed to Judda, Capoverland to Cairo to procure a phirmaund from the Beys, for liberty for the English to trade to Suez. Argyree returned successful, at the commencement of Mr. Hastings's government, with whose concurrence he, in fulfilment of his vow, founded the Greek church in Calcutta, in the year 1772. The Greeks had previously performed their worship in a small chapel.

This Greek church was rebuilt in the year 1780, and was richly endowed by Argyree and others. It is splendidly fitted up, and lighted on silver branches. The patriarch of Constantinople appoints the priests, of whom there are three attached to the church. The Greeks have another church at Dacca, but far inferior in splendour to that in Calcutta.

THOMAS FISHER.

Mr. URBAN, Nov. 9. HAVING accidentally witnessed this morning the annual civic pageant commonly called "Lord Mayor's Show," I have been induced to trouble you with a few observations on the sad want of historical propriety in the dressing of the important characters in this long celebrated spectacle. Need I add that I mean the men in armour? Great, indeed, was my indignation, as,

ensconced behind a door-post, in bodily fear of the rushing mob, I beheld the approach of the procession. There was a knight looking rueful through the rouge which had been laid on with an unsparing hand. He was clad in armour of (as I should suppose) the time of Charles the First; but his mailed fist grasped, oh insult foul! the halbert of a footman of the time of Henry the Eighth! Another knight followed in armour of about the same period, but he too held a partizan of a much earlier period. Then came a Lancer, carrying a circular shield and a German two-handed sword; and then a gentleman arrayed in a suit of brass mail, no doubt manufactured from the original of some hero at Astley's theatre; but bearing no resemblance to the armour of our ancestors. These monstrous anachronisms, venerable Sir, raise the bile of an antiquary: it is enough to be doomed to sit at a play in which the characters are dressed without regard to historical propriety, and consequently destroy the illusion. We see the same boots, which graced the leg of Charles the Second on the preceding evening, to-night encircling the calf of the villain lago, and a thousand other absurdities in costume; but in a pageant intended to represent the doings of five hundred years since, such want of taste is inexcusable. But I am perhaps to blame for indulging in this warm invective. Can it be expected that the directors of the Lord Mayor's Show should know how to " get up" such a spectacle, when we have scarcely a single volume of Tales or Romances, no, with shame be it spoken, not even Sir Walter Scott's, which has its appropriate illustrations. It is by no means an uncommon thing to see an illustration of an historical Novel, in which, out of a group of five or six figures, two may by accident be represented in appropriate costume, while the others wear dresses of two hundred years earlier or later, just as the fancy of the artist dictates! It is for you, Mr. Urban, to reform this abuse, and I trust ere long to see you come forth to punish these wanton caricaturists of A.

our ancestors.

ley, co. Kent, (from 1765 to 1777,) I was much struck with the truth it contains; and as it forms one of the cheap tracts published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, should feel happy if I could by any means extend its circulation; in his preface the reverend author says,

а

"I was led to the subject of the following Essay, by an accident. I am curate in a country parish; who make it my business, and have found it my pleasure, to teach the children of my people, privately in my own house, and publicly in the church; and I am for the present the only Sunday schoolmaster of the place. In the course of my instructions, I had occasion to observe that the Catechism of the Church of England, though a most excellent summary of the Christian doctrine, is deficient in one point, viz. the constitution of the Church of Christ; the knowledge of which in a certain degree, is necessary to the preservation of that charity which is the end of the commandment; and for the want of which, so many are drawn away from the Church who would certainly have remained with Yet is it, if they had known what it is. our Catechism not so deficient, but that the world and the church; which distincit includes the grand distinction betwixt tion being explained, I found we were possessed of a leading idea, which gave so much light to my young pupils, that I determined to go through the subject."

To the edition published by the Society in 1818, is a postscript, which

says,

"This good man did not live to see the dismembering of the British empire, by the separation of the American colonies, begun and carried on by the same party both here and there, to the loss of so many thousand lives, and the oppressing of the people with new and endless burthens of taxes. So notorious was the case, that even the gentlemen of the army, who had an opportunity of making proper observations, brought home this report to the Mother Country, that if the Church of England had but obtained that timely support in the Colonies, for which it had so often petitioned, the American rebellion had never happened; and if this Government shall be as remiss towards itself in the Mother Country, as it has been in the Colonies, the same evils will soon break out at home."

This work was, I believe, originally published between the years 1760 and 1770. Mr. Jones must therefore take precedence even of the Rev. Thomas Stock, of Gloucester, in the formation of a Sunday School. J. T.

Mr. URBAN,

New Kent-road, Nov.9.

IN a communication descriptive of some ancient Paintings on wainscot, inserted in your hundredth volume, part ii. p. 497, I offered some remarks on the custom of decorating the walls of apartments at a very early period with pictorial representations.

It was observed that about the reign of Elizabeth, a mode of hanging rooms with drapery was introduced, which partook both of the nature of tapestry and of the custom of painting on the walls, viz. painted cloths. That passage of Shakspeare's Henry IV. was quoted in illustration, in which Falstaff says his newly-raised recruits are as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth;" and another was referred to, in which, in order to induce his hostess Dame Quickly to part with her furniture, that she might be enabled to make him a loan, he persuades her that "a German hunting in water-work is worth a thousand of those fly-bitten tapestries."

I was disposed to confound these German paintings in fresco with the painted cloths, until chance threw a further light on the subject, by presenting on the walls of an ancient mansion a series of paintings of Shakspeare's period, in fresco, all the details of which are decidedly German.

The house above mentioned, which is represented in the Plate, stood on the open common at Woodford in Essex, and was demolished as recently

as the autumn of 1832.* It was situated at some distance from the north side of the London road, at the corner of Snake's-lane; was called Grovehouse; and was traditionally said to have been a hunting seat of the Earl of Essex,-of Robert Devereux, I suppose, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth.t A portion of the north wall of this mansion still, I am informed, remaining, bears a shield, sculptured in stone, and charged with the inscrip

L

tion I. B. 1580. These initials, together with the arms of the Companies of Merchant-Adventurers and Grocers,

* A view of the other side of the house has been prettily etched by Mr. George Cooke.

The same tradition was attached to Hereford house, afterwards the poorhouse, at Woodford; engraved in our vol. LXV. p. 609.

GENT. MAG. November, 1833.

which will be subsequently noticed, seem to show it was rather built for the country villa of a wealthy citizen.

This venerable rural lodge, like all our larger houses of the olden time, was distinguished by the number of its gables aligning with its front. It had, among several others, three apartments, one distinguished by the traditional or perhaps fanciful appellation of the ball-room; another by that of the banqueting-room; a third, from its wainscoted walls, the oaken chamber. The ball-room was a long gallery, the style of which assimilated with naval architecture, as may be seen in the engraving. On that part of the walls of this room, which united at an angle with the ceiling, were, in twelve compartments, as many subjects of rural life painted in fresco. Six of these paintings remained tolerably perfect; while the others exhibited only a few traces of their former existence, or were obliterated by a coat of whitewash, with which the whole in modern days had been covered, owing to the following remarkable circumstances. The old mansion had been occupied as a school, and the master had made this spacious gallery the dormitory of his scholars. When the children went to bed by twilight in the long summer evenings, these figures on the walls so disturbed their infant imaginations, that they could not settle themselves to repose. The pedagogue was no antiquary, and the phantoms were exorcised by the plasterer's brush. In the course of subsequent years the crazy mansion was left empty and abandoned, the whitewash peeled from the walls, and the shadows in German fresco again made their appearance. What remained perfect of these limnings, has been preserved by a young lady of taste, by whose permission I contribute one of them for the graphic illustration of these notes, regretting

that your page cannot find room for the whole of the subjects which she The first of these is a has preserved. hay-making, the mowers busily em

This young lady was the pupil of Mr. Henry Stothard, teacher of drawing and modelling, himself a pupil of the late Mr. Flaxman. To him I am indebted for various local particulars relative to Grovehouse, which I had not the opportunity of obtaining in person previously to its demolition.