ceive, be held exceedingly sacred. This feeling is strong as the passions are weak. A people that are remarkable for cleanliness, will be so for industry, for honesty, for avarice, and vice versa. The Italians cheat, steal, rob (when they think it worth their while to do so) with licensed impunity: the Swiss, who feel the value of property, and labour incessantly to acquire it, are afraid to lose it. At Brigg I first heard the cry of watchmen at night, which I had not heard for many months. I was reminded of the traveller who after wandering in remote countries saw a gallows near at hand, and knew by this circumstance that he approached the confines of civilization. The police in Italy is both secret and severe, but it is directed chiefly to political and not to civil matters. Patriot sighs are heaved unheard in the dungeons of St. Angelo: the Neapolitan bandit breathes the free air of his native mountains!

It may by this time be conjectured why Catholics are less cleanly than Protestants, because in fact they are less scrupulous, and swallow whatever is set before them in matters of faith as well as other things. Protestants, as such, are captious and scrutinising, try to pick holes and find fault,—have a dry, meagre, penurious imagination. Catholics are buoyed up over doubts and difficulties by a greater redundance of fancy, and make religion subservient to a sense of enjoyment. The one are for detecting and weeding out all corruptions and abuses in doctrine or worship the others enrich theirs with the dust and cobwebs of antiquity, and think their ritual none the worse for the tarnish of age. Those of the Catholic Communion are willing to take it for granted that everything is right; the professors of the Reformed religion have a pleasure in believing that everything is wrong, in order that they may have to set it right. In morals, again, Protestants are more precise than their Catholic brethren. The creed of the latter absolves them of half their duties, of all those

that are a clog on their inclinations, atones for all slips, and patches up all deficiencies. But though this may make them less censorious and sour, I am not sure that it renders them less in earnest in the part they do perform. When more is left to freedom of choice, perhaps the service that is voluntary will be purer and more effectual. That which is not so may as well be done by proxy; or if it does not come from the heart, may be suffered to exhale merely from the lips. If less is owing in this case to a dread of vice and fear of shame, more will proceed from a love of virtue, free from the least sinister construction. It is asserted that Italian women are more gross; I can believe it, and that they are at the same time more refined than others. Their religion is in the same manner more sensual but is it not to the full as visionary and imaginative as any? I have heard Italian women say things that others would not-it does not therefore follow that they would do them: partly because the knowledge of vice that makes it familiar renders it indifferent; and because the same masculine tone of thinking that enables them to confront vice, may raise them above it into a higher sphere of sentiment. If their senses are more inflammable, their passions (and their love of virtue and of religion among the rest) may glow with proportionable ardour. Indeed the truest virtue is that which is least susceptible of contamination from its opposite. I may admire a Raphael, and yet not swoon at sight of a daub. Why should there not be the same taste in morals as in pictures or poems? Granting that vice has more votaries here, at least it has fewer mercenary ones, and this is no trifling advantage. As to manners, the Catholics must be allowed to carry it all over the world. The better sort not only say nothing to give you pain; they say nothing of others that it would give them pain to hear repeated. Scandal and tittle-tattle are long banished from good society. After all, to be wise is to be humane. What

would our English blue-stockings say to this? The fault and the excellence of Italian society is, that the shocking or disagreeable is not supposed to have an existence in the nature of things.1

The New School of Reform;

A Dialogue between a Rationalist and a Sentimentalist. Rationalist. What is it you so particularly object to this school? Is there anything so very obnoxious in thẹ doctrine of Utility, which they profess? Or in the design to bring about the greatest possible good by the most efficacious and disinterested means?

Sentimentalist. Disinterested enough, indeed: since their plan seems to be to sacrifice every individual comfort for the good of the whole. Can they find out no better way of making human life smooth and pleasant, than by drying up the brain and curdling the blood? I do not want society to resemble a Living Skeleton, whatever these "Job's Comforters" may do. They are like the fox in the fable-they have no feeling themselves, and would persuade others to do without it. Take away the dulce of the poet, and I do not see what is to become of the utile. It is the common error of the human mind, of forgetting the end in the means.

Rationalist. I see you are at your Sentimentalities again. Pray, tell me, is it not their having applied this epithet

1 The dirt and comparative want of conveniences among Catholics is often attributed to the number of their Saints' days and festivals, which divert them from labour, and give them an idle and disorderly turn of mind.

2 I suspect this to have been held between Northcote and the Author, or rather to have been formed out of some remarks which arose in the course of conversation at Northcote's.-ED.

to some of your favourite speculations, that has excited this sudden burst of spleen against them?

Sentimentalist. At least I cannot retort this phrase on those printed circulars which they throw down areas and fasten under knockers. But pass on for that. Answer me, then-What is there agreeable or ornamental in human life that they do not explode with fanatic rage? What is there sordid and cynical that they do not eagerly catch at? What is there that delights others that does not disgust them? What that disgusts others with which they are not delighted? I cannot think that this is owing to philosophy, but to a sinister bias of mind; inasmuch as a marked deficiency of temper is a more obvious way of accounting for certain things than an entire superiority of understanding. The ascetics of old thought they were doing God good service by tormenting themselves and denying others the most innocent amusements. Who doubts now that in this (armed as they were with texts and authorities and awful denunciations) they were really actuated by a morose and envious disposition, that had no capacity for enjoyment itself, or felt a malicious repugnance to the idea of it in any one else? What in them took the garb of religion, with us puts on the semblance of philosophy; and instead of dooming the heedless and refractory to hellfire or the terrors of purgatory, our modern polemics set their disciples in the stocks of Utility, or throw all the elegant arts and amiable impulses of humanity into the limbo of Political Economy.

Rationalist. I cannot conceive what possible connection there can be between the weak and mischievous enthusiasts you speak of, and the most enlightened reasoners of the nineteenth century. They would laugh at such a comparison.

Sentimentalist. Self-knowledge is the last thing which I should lay to the charge of soi-disant philosophers; but a man may be a bigot without a particle of religion, a

monk or an Inquisitor in a plain coat and professing the most liberal opinions.

Rationalist. You still deal, as usual, in idle sarcasms and flimsy generalities. Will you descend to particulars, and state facts before you draw inferences from them?

Sentimentalist. In the first place, then, they are mostly Scotchmen-lineal descendants of the Covenanters and Cameronians, and inspired with the true John-Knox zeal for mutilating and defacing the carved work of the sanctuary

Rationalist. Hold, hold-this is vulgar prejudice and personality

Sentimentalist. But it's the fact, and I thought you called for facts. Do you imagine if I hear a fellow in Scotland abusing the Author of Waverley, who has five hundred hearts beating in his bosom, because there is no Religion in his works, and a fellow in Westminster doing the same thing because there is no Political Economy in them, that anything will prevent me from supposing that this is virtually the same Scotch pedlar with his pack of Utility at his back, whether he deals in tape and stays or in drawling compilations of histories and reviews?

Rationalist. I did not know you had such an affection for Sir Walter

Sentimentalist. I said the Author of Waverley. Not to like him would be not to love myself or human nature, of which he has given so many interesting specimens: though for the sake of that same human nature, I have no liking to Sir Walter. Those "few and recent writers," on the contrary, who by their own account "have discovered the true principles of the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers," are easily reconciled to the Tory and the bigot, because they here feel a certain superiority over him; but they cannot forgive the great historian of life and manners, because he has enlarged our sympathy with human happiness beyond their pragmatical limits. They are not