hard-featured little village stretching in a single, long street along the main road to Ramsey, and distant half a mile from the sea. Luckily, so far, it has escaped the blight of "development," and has plenty of character and local Manx colour. The church was rebuilt in 1835—no need to state in what style—but a fragment of its predecessor remains on the east of the graveyard. Near this is the tomb of Bishop Thomas Wilson (d. 1755), with an inscription by his son, "Who in obedience to the express Commands of his worthy Father, Declines giving him the Character He so justly Deserved. Let this island speak the Rest." There is a portrait of Bishop Wilson—no doubt sufficiently fanciful—in Mr. Hall Caine's Deemster, where he appears as the good native Bishop. Wilson, however, was really a Cheshireman, having been born at Burton-in-Wirral in 1663; and was educated as a sizar at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a contemporary of the saturnine Jonathan Swift. In 1692 he was appointed domestic chaplain to the ninth Earl of Derby, and tutor to his son, which determined the whole after course of his life. The Stanleys at this time were no longer "Kings of Man," but they still possessed authority almost regal. "In the year 1393 the Earl of Salisbury sold to Sir William le Scroop, afterwards Earl of Wiltshire, the Isle of Man, with the title of King, and the right of being crowned with a golden crown." In 1406, after some intermediate dealings with which we need not here concern ourselves, the island (still carrying with it, no doubt, the right to "the golden round") passed to Sir John Stanley, who died in 1414; and with the Stanleys it continued till it passed by the marriage of an heiress to the Atholl Murrays in 1736. The regal title, however, had been dropped by the second Earl of Derby (d. 1521), "as he preferred being a great lord to being a petty King." The famous island arms (Gules three legs in armour embossed and conjoined at the thighs proper, spurred and garnished, or) still figure among the many quarterings of the house of Stanley. They may also be found on old work in connection with buildings with which the Stanleys had presumably something to do—on the west front, for example, of the fifteenth-century tower of Bidstone Church in Cheshire, and on a misericorde in Manchester Cathedral.

RAMSEY BAY, LOOKING NORTHWARD.
Ramsey is the second town in size in the island and like Douglas faces East.

Among the many other prerogatives that the ninth Earl of Derby still retained as Lord of Man was the strange one of appointing its Bishop. The last Bishop, Baptist Levinz, had died in 1693, and for some strange reason no successor had been appointed. It is said that at last William III. threatened to take the appointment into his own hand, and the Earl was thus compelled to make his tardy election. It fell on Thomas Wilson, who was consecrated at the Savoy in 1698. Wilson from the first set his face against corruption, and administered his diocese with firmness and good-nature. He seems, in fact, in his remote island diocese, to have played a part in some ways not dissimilar to that which was played by the "admirable Walker" in the Furness parish of Seathwaite. "He soon became 'a very energetic planter' of fruit and forest trees, turning 'the bare slopes' into 'a richly-wooded glen.' He was an equally zealous farmer and miller, doing much by his example to develop the resources of the island. For some time he was 'the only physician in the island'; he set up a drug-shop, giving advice and medicine gratis to the poor. Against the then besetting sin of pluralism Wilson turned a face of steel; twice he refused the offer of the rich living of Badsworth, in the West Riding, which twice his patron offered him, because he disapproved of non-resident incumbents. His deep practical piety is manifest from his two posthumous books, Maxims of Piety and Christianity and Sacra Privata. But perhaps the best-known episode in his long episcopate of more than fifty-seven years—he died at the patriarchal age of ninety-three—was his imprisonment in Castle Rushen for refusal to pay a fine. In 1722 he had suspended the Governor's chaplain for administering the Communion to the Governor's wife, she being then in some sense excommunicate, and for sanctioning false doctrine. Mulcted for this interference in a sum of £50, Wilson and his two Vicars-General elected to go to prison rather than submit to the tyranny of an authority that they held to be usurped. Wilson, indeed, seems to have endeavoured to maintain in the Isle of Man a system of moral discipline similar to that the decay of which is deplored in the Commination Service. His practice, however, was tolerant; the Quakers are said to have 'loved and respected him'; Roman Catholics not infrequently attended his services; whilst Dissenters, since permitted to stand, or sit, at the Communion, were content to kneel at the altar-rails like ordinary church-folk. To burial inside the walls of a church he exhibited strong abhorrence; and provision was expressly inserted in his will that his own body should be interred in the graveyard." A similar repulsion was entertained by Dr. Wynne, a former resident of Mold, in Flintshire, whose sentiments have found public expression, if I recollect rightly, in his epitaph, composed by himself. In this case, unfortunately, by a curious irony of fate, a subsequent extension of the chancel to the east has since brought his grave within the compass of the church.

In the lych-gate on the east side of Kirkmichael Churchyard are preserved several of those fine old crosses, though more or less in fragments, that form the chief archaeological glory of Man, and are now tended with such laudable care. Something of these is said on a later page. The Bishop's Palace at Bishop's Court, a long mile to the north from the end of the village, has been the residence of the Bishop from at least the thirteenth century, and probably for very much longer. The bishopric of Sodor and Man was founded, according to tradition, as early as the fourth century, when Amphibalus is reported Bishop in 360; but all its early history is difficult and obscure. Originally it comprised, not merely Man, but also the Scottish Hebrides (Southern Isles, or Sudreys, as opposed to the Northern Islands, i.e., the Shetlands and Orkneys); but the latter were necessarily severed when the island was wrested from the Scots in the reign of Edward III. Thomas (d. 1348), or William Russel (d. 1374), may approximately be considered as the first solely Manx Bishop; but the ancient title of Sodor still forms part of their official title, just as the Kings of England still continued to quarter the fleur-de-lys of France long after Mary had lost Calais.

Bishop's Court, however, is a little out of the way for those who wish to cross the hills from Kirkmichael to Ramsey. Nor does the place indeed exhibit any interest for the archaeologist, though the Bishop's private chapel is at present used as a kind of pro-cathedral for the diocese. From Kirkmichael Village there is a track—that for part of the distance is no track—almost directly due east, which passes between Slieau Dhoo (1,139 feet), on the north, and Slieau Fraoghane (1,602 feet), on the south, and ultimately drops into the head of Sulby Glen at the bottom of the western slopes of Snaefell.