James Leach

and if in those the superficial gloss of the later day was wanting, there was generally more of verve and earnestness in the singer, and of substance in the music, with a blessed freedom from adulteration.

The immediate subject of my remarks is James Leach, the Lancashire composer, and it is to Sarmody, in the domain of which he was a master, that I shall speak.

deeply impressed with the rich fulness and beauty of leach's hymn tunes i have collected together such particulars of the composer his life and works as i have been able to glean from the scanty sources that are now available though the facts presented are meagre it has not been without difficulty that even these have been gathered The hymn tunes of an earlier time are in many respects different in character to those of today.

They beget a warmer personal interest, and we enter more readily into their spirit and purpose.

They are so cut and dried and rounded, and polished to suit phlegmatic and unemotional worshippers, that nearly everything like character is effaced from them.

in short they have been toned down with the smoothing-iron of conventional taste and fastidiousness to harmonise with the idea now taught and with which society is largely permeated that anything like a display of enthusiasm is a mark of ill-breeding perhaps it might be possible to take exception on somewhat similar grounds to a few of the tunes of former times To some extent that may be so, but even as regards the most commonplace of those that have survived the test of time, there is a kindly warmth, as of a living heart beating within them.

That quality in the highest degree I claim for the hymn-tunes of James Leach, whose name is known to most of us, though it is scarcely preserved and held in that esteem which it deserves to be.

The name and memory of Leach should be cherished in Lancashire, for he was one of her gifted sons.