The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world.  To the musicial Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully-tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it.  By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigner; the proper use of bells is work out mathematical permuations and combinations.  When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musicians’ music — still less what the ordinary man calls music.  To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association. The change-ringer does, indeed, distinguish musical differences between one method of producing his permutations and another; he avers, for instance, that where the hinder bells run 7, 5, 6 or 5, 6, 7, or 5, 7, 6, the music is always prettier, and can detect and approve, where they occur, the consecutive fifths of Tittums and the cascading thirds of the Queen’s change.  But what he really means is, that by the English method of ringing with rope and wheel, each several bell gives forth her fullest and her noblest note.  His passion – and it is a passion – finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.