THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 63
between the Epistle and the Gospel. It was the custom in the Middle Ages to sing the anthem between the Gospel and the Epistle. On festal clays two of the chief choristers put on silken hoods and ascended the rostrum. When the anthem was over they sang the Alleluia. The choir took it up, and made a musical jubilation on a certain number of notes to the final A, called neumes. These had no words, and were named sequences, as following the Alleluia. When Jumieges was destroyed by the Normans in 851, a monk came to St. Gall with his Antiphonary, in which Notker found words set as mnemonics to these troublesome notes. This led him to write something more worthy for the musical sequences sung at the various festivals. The Notkerian Proses were the result. At first they were unrhymed, but were afterwards put in rhyme and increased gradually in beauty and popularity.
Dr. Neale, the son of the Rev. Cornelius Neale, Senior Wrangler and Fellow of St. John s College, Cambridge, was born in Conduit Street, London, in 1818. His mother was the daughter of John Mason Good, an accomplished physician and literary man (see 332). His father died when he was five. He owed more than he could ever express to his mother s care and training. In 1836 he gained a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his antipathy to mathematics, some what strange in a senior wrangler s son, stood in his way, so that he had to content himself with an ordinary degree. He married, in 1842, Miss S. N. Webster, daughter of an evangelical clergyman, and next year was presented to the incumbency of Crawley, in Sussex. His lungs, however, were affected, and he had to go to Madeira, so that he was never instituted to the living. In 1846 Lord de la Warr made him Warden of Sackville College, East Grinstead, and there he spent the remainder of his lifd in a charge of an obscure alms- house, with a salary of 27. He founded a Sisterhood of St. Margaret s at Rotherfield, which was moved to East Grinstead in 1856, and developed into a great institution which has brought help to thousands of the sick and suffering. The work met much opposition, but gradually won public favour. Dr. Neale was able to lay the foundation of the new convent in July, 1865, and saw the building in progress before he died, in childlike faith and humility, in 1866.
Dr. Neale began his Commentary on the Psalms while re cruiting in Madeira. At Sackville College his History of the
�� �
