for a supposed benefit. An acolyte, carrying the never-forgotten money-box, followed the priest, and every person contributed a coin. It would require more than an ordinary degree of charity not to have the impression that this was a shocking spectacle of extortion and imposture. At the west end of the church they were bringing buckets of water from the ground-floor of the tower, and selling it in tumblers and bottles. A woman, on being asked what this meant, replied that it was some of the 'eau bénite de Sainte Odile, bonne pour les yeux, et bonne pour la purification de l'estomac.' They were giving it to several very young children, whose minds are thus enslaved with superstition at the moment when reason dawns! It was humiliating to behold the degradation of the human intellect in this ridiculous affair; and it was yet more painful to reflect on the deeper moral mischief it involved. We thought the priest did not appear quite comfortable as we stood gazing,, with a variety of emotions, on this piece of folly."

These are not to be set down as the utterances of youthful levity, since they are set down by one who calls himself a professor in a college, and consequently a teacher of youth, being extracted from Sketches on the Continent in 1835, by John Hoppus, M.A., Professor of the Philosophy of the Human Mind and Logic in the University of London' (I. 73). Doubtless he is right in saying that the priest did not appear "quite comfortable" under the gaze of that fine family which developed "a variety of emotions," including among them envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. And yet we cannot help dropping a certain mead of approbation to the heroic martyrdom of a man like this, who day by day exposes himself to the torture of witnessing, and the labour of railing at such exhibitions. How much sounder, both in body and mind, would he have returned from his vacation-tour had he determined not to cross the threshold of any temple desecrated by impure rites! If he possessed any of the logic he taught, he must have known that he was not taking the

best way to remedy the evil. Yet is his irritation not entirely thrown away. Its steady continuity over page after page, down to the end of his two volumes, is a phenomenon so amusing, that I can testify to its having procured one reader at least for his two volumes, whom their purely literary merits would not have secured. Wordsworth has some pretty lines on this point worth recalling :

"Doomed as we are, our native dust
To wet with many a bitter tear,
It ill befits us to disdain
The altar-to deride the fane,
Where patient sufferers bend in trust
To win a happier sphere.

"I love, where spreads the village green, Upon some knee-worn cell to gaze; Hail to the firm unmoving cross, Aloft where pines their branches toss,

And to the chapel far withdrawn
That lurks by lonely ways."

Here we have a kindly thought finely expressed, but the idea is æsthetic rather than logical; and as I am not poetical, I think I could furnish my prosaic brethren with a more conclusive argument against doing a bit of missionary work in their vacation ramble by scoffs and grimaces-namely, that they will not accomplish the desired effect. It needs no sympathy with the alien worship to lead to this conclusion. Fine painting and statuary I can admire when I see them in a church, and fully as much, if not more, when they are elsewhere; but wax dolls in tawdry finery, and the distorted figures in the Calvaries, with gaping wounds splashed with red ochre, I cannot find delight in, whatever pity I may have for the pallid and squalid devotees who crouch round them. Neither, I must confess, have such great cathedral musical performances, as it has been my chance to listen to abroad, always inspired me with devotion. The grand effects are apt rather to rouse something like martial enthusiasm. The less ambitious strains, again, are apt to suggest old dancing-school associations-across hands and down the middle. But if there are people

whom these things render devout, we may be assured that the same people will not also be rendered devout if they be transferred from the high embowed roof and dim religious light which form their accompaniments, and are transferred into an angular granite box, with square holes to let in the light, in which a hard logician delivers his indisputable conclusions under fifteen heads, and is followed by a performance in which all the tuneless voices of the parish strive to outdo each other in loud dissonance.

By the way, the finest piece of devotional music which I ever heard fell upon my ear in a rather strange shape, one evening in Dresden. The streets were rather empty, because the population of that Protestant town had flocked out to witness some races in the Roman fashion, held with unusual lustre in honour of the day, 'which was Easter Sunday. I observed a thin stream of men, however, walking rapidly to some spot, as if they were going on 'Change to transact heavy business in stock. Their unmistakable ethnetic characteristics, and the architecture of the building which received them, showed that this was a synagogue. The architecture was Saracenic, and no bad type of the method in which other religious bodies seek to make their edifices congenial to their own worship-namely, by making them as unlike as possible to the edifices in which some denomination with whom they are at variance hold their worship. As Saracenic, the building was no doubt well distinguished from a Christian church; but the architecture of the followers of Mohammed would not bring it any nearer to the style of the Temple of Jerusalem. Entering with the rest, I found a congregation of which the greater portion sat at deal desks, with tallow candles before them; while the remainder stood, like myself, in the vestibule, where there seemed to me to be no other Gentiles. I had but just entered when an Israelite

stepped up to me, and with genuine earnestness pointed out a solecism which I had committed in taking off my hat; it was a natural inadvertency easily remedied. A priest of some sort, dressed in rather good taste, as I thought, made his appearance at the farther end of the building, and read something which I did not hear distinctly, and would, I suppose, not have understood if I had. Then rose the music; it was vocal-at least I think it must have been so from the absence of any of the distinctive sounds which are produced by inanimate mechanism, and tell the nature of the machine that has produced themas vibrating string, inflated tube, or stretched tissue. But there was such perfect unison in it that you could not say it was from many voices, though one knew it must have been, from its great volume; it felt like one voice, and that in no special place, but filling the whole circumference, where it rose and fell, with such solemn pathos as I have never felt in music before or since. What was the special religious observance illustrated by this music I do not know, and have rather avoided discovering, as I suspect it might turn out to be something inimical to Christianity. But were one to select a religion for the sake of its music, I would know where to go, were it not that the Israelites do not receive converts to partake in the portion of the select people.

Of course, wherever the Scarlet Lady has established herself, all other things odious will naturally be found. Indeed, those who are thoroughly zealous in their own cause do not like to find anything in common with it in the adversary. They think it an encroachment on their own manor, that in any matter whatever he should be at one with them. Hence it is rather gratifying than otherwise to find all our prejudices in morals and decorum outraged wherever Popery prevails. The hour of trial comes, however, when we get among

our Protestant brethren, and find, for instance, that in the places we have always revered as the fountains of the Reformation, Sunday is the special day of theatres, concerts, and overflowing taverns. It happened to me once to be wandering with some companions through the highly orthodox Canton of Vaud on a Sunday afternoon. If the reader turn up the whites of his eyes, I tell him he has no right to presume that my journey was not one of necessity and mercy. We selected for our night's resting-place a small house of entertainment the equivalent of the village alehouse at home. It was crammed to the throat with the Protestant peasantry of the district, smoking, drinking, and recreating themselves with billiards and other house games- -a strange preference, I thought it, to out-door sauntering in that sultry evening; but that was their affair. Desirous to walk in the cool of the morning to Yverdun, we asked if breakfast could be prepared for us so early as four o'clock. The good woman of the house-a model of clean respectability and civility bade us observe that it was Sunday evening, and that, in consequence, she would be engaged with her guests until a late hour, with which early rising would be incompatible. But she would do her best for us. Breakfast would be made ready for us; we would find it in the guest-chamber, and we could rise and proceed as we thought fit. So we paid our bill before going to bed. Through my sleep I heard the click of billiardballs far on in the night. When we rose we found silence everywhere, and a comfortable breakfast awaiting us, and so sallied forth in the fresh morning air through the dewy fields and woods, reflecting pleasantly on that primitive simplicity and reliance on the faith of mankind which prompted our hostess thus to deal with a set of travel-worn strangers of uncouth speech and queer manners, and that, too, in a district where the

British tourist was an unknown phenomenon. I have sometimes doubted if the concentrated force of all Forbes Mackenzyism and teetotalism will ever produce a like faith that knows no guile among our own publicans. The incident became by the way oddly mixed up in my mind with an anecdote current at the time, relating to a visit by an eminent pastor of this same Canton de Vaud to a distinguished Presbyterian divine in Edinburgh. Rising, according to the custom of his district, about six o'clock on a Sunday morning, and wandering through the deserted rooms, he found in one of them a piano, whereat he sat down, and was enabled to solace himself for some minutes with the performance of the

"Chantons tous le Canton de Vaud Si beau,"

ere the horrified household could arise and rush on him to rescue their home from further pollution.

This discussion about clerical and ethnical divergences recalls to me an instance of external similarity in things contrary, which I have several times noticed, but never could rightly account for. How is it that the men who in the Protestant states of Germany are seen frequenting restaurations and other places of public entertainment on Sunday, bear so close a general resemblance to those clergy of the more stringent of the religious bodies calling themselves especially evangelical, who on that day are so differently occupied in this country? There are the white neckcloths of exactly the same tie; the same black costume with a tendency to baggyness; the same air of solid respectability, stopping short of high-breeding; the same demure precision, approaching to austerity of countenance, from which laugh and genial smile are equally remote. It would, I think, have enlarged the minds of the respectable and zealous Free Kirk session of Glendrouthie had they chanced to behold a sight which rather startled

myself—namely, a perfect fac-simile of their venerated pastor beheld by me one fine Sunday, in a village tavern in Saxony, deep in a game at billiards, a cigar between his lips of course, the universal great glass flagon of beer, also of course, close at hand, whence his wife, sitting knitting behind, took an occasional sip, while over the scene was engraved, in large German characters, a text from the Lutheran translation of the New Testament inculcating charity. Although I could not get up any righteous indignation at the scene when it ceased to be a hallucination, yet I am not prepared to say that if I actually encountered my revered friend in the flesh drinking, smoking, and playing billiards in a tavern on Sunday, I should think him at all in a promising way. But, on the other hand, I cannot feel sure that it would improve Herr Billard-Spieler to pull off the eight tumblers which his reverend likeness can consume at a Presbytery dinner after the day's work is over, and carry like a man and a Christian. Yet had there been a little more toleration for the simpler and lighter enjoyments of life in the parish of Glendrouthie, it might not have come to pass that our reverend friend's colleague should have so flagrantly disregarded the advice to limit his potations to his capacity, and brought that great scandal on his Church and his family; nor, perhaps, would the parish have become notorious for the awful case of that relentless elder who had trodden out every vestige of amusement and recreation left among the people, and whose grim face continued to be a terror to all who met him in his walks, until that day when he suddenly disappeared, leaving behind him a mine of horrible iniquities to explode on the astonished serious world.

"We all have our failings, more or less," as a vulgar saying goes; and one of the difficulties which philosophers have in all ages had to struggle with is, how to take a

due estimate of each one's special share in this universal commodity. I must admit that the air of respectable comfort which I saw this year throughout the northern states of Germany, and even Bohemia, when fairly estimated, left a balance in outward appearances against my own country which I would rather not have found it necessary to strike. Wherever one could go-winding about in the worst streets of the poorest parts of the towns, at night or early dawn-at the places of gratuitous entertainment, where the lowest of the people congregatedat one of the many Leipzig fairs, for instance, when the town was one dense, almost impenetrable mob-again, in the high-roads and the villages a universal air of respectability and comfort was to be seen. How well off any of the people might be, one could not tell; but it was easy to see that, with very rare exceptions, all had good clothes and sufficient food-scarcely a vestige of that squalor and raggedness of which there is always so considerable a percentage with us. I think, in these outward elements of comfort, Germany has made a great advance during the past twenty years. I specially noted that you could see no symptom of a very unpleasant type of shabbiness-one class wearing the cast-off clothes of another. In Ireland there is nothing else to be seen in the costume of the peasantry; and it is there a problem no one seems to have solved, where the universal rags come into existence and use as fine Saxony broadcloth. I speak, however, of Ireland twelve years ago; it is said that there is a change there now. I wish it extended to the portion of her sons who do us the honour of migrating hither; for it is to them, after all, that I suspect we must attribute the humiliation of owning that superiority in the condition of the humblest classes among German people which I am bound to admit.

industrious than they used to be, yet they are still a leisurely, easypaced people, stopping in the journey through life at many places of refreshment and enjoyment, and tacitly determining not to subject themselves to the hurry and scurry, the railway speed, the fierce competition, the hot anxieties, and the general overstrain of all the nerves of life, in which we live and move and have our being. How, then, is it that they are exempt from the squalor and raggedness which scandalise and oppress the energetic British people? Political economy affords a pretty distinct answer. They possess collectively less than us because they are not so enterprising and industrious, and consequently produce less. But the very absence of that activity which creates our greater riches, exempts them from the same keen competition to participate in what they have. In an extremely energetic, active, competitive condition of society, woe to those who cannot keep up with the general scramble-they must go to the wall. And with us, unfortunately, it happens that there exists a whole race on whose condition the inability to keep up with their neighbours is distinctly marked.

A modification of the same feature becomes perceptible when you cross the frontier of the purely German states into Bohemia. There the frequent trampers barefooted, in worn uncouth raiment, indicate a race beyond the pale of the civilised European communities of which the German is an eminently respectable member. But here the uncouthness is more barbarous than squalid. It is not drawn from the refuse of civilisation, like that of our ragged tramp or city savage. The costume in which skins and coarse home-made cloth prevail have been made for the wearers; and they have, like Peter Bell, a wildness as of dwellers out-of-doors rather than frequenters of the ginpalace and pawn-shop. The adult males among them have rather a formidable look, and they are addicted to carrying sticks, which, by

way of ornamental head, are terminated by a heavy lump of metal.

Good as his coat is, however, and respectable the outward appearance of everything about him, I believe the German has his skeleton in his house. Gambling appears to be his most formidable national vice, and Homberg and Baden-Baden could give forth abundant revelations of crime and ruin. That a people so keen and energetic as the British should not be greatly subject to this vice, is probably owing to that very keenness and energy. Their calculating faculties and speculative propensities being embarked for many daily hours in the business of life, they seek physical enjoyments in athletic games and field - sports rather than in the risks and excitements which are but an exaggeration of the toil from which they seek relief. Gambling is in general the resource of a lethargic people, requiring a high stimulus to enable them to taste the joys of active excitement. Much as is said against spiritdrinking among us, the continued imbibing of beer and smoke from morn till dewy eve must have its deleterious influences, and, I take it, greatly aggravates the lethargic lassitude which makes the German slow and idle, and prompts him to seek the excitement of the gamingtable.

But I was enabled to see in a still more distinct shape the shadow of his skeleton. My occupation at home giving me opportunities of looking at a large stock of the criminal population, I sought and obtained opportunities of inspecting a sample of that commodity in the course of my travels. I found that the German criminal differs unmistakably from the British in bearing deeper marks of ruffianism and dangerousness. I would say that, as you cannot help observing that the average citizens of a German town are less energetic, active, and practically intelligent than the same class among ourselves, so, on the other hand, it is clear that their criminals have more purpose and