evil, there is no doubt that our elections are like an inoculating for a disorder, and so mitigating; the party spirit and the feuds which now spend themselves in bloodless contests, would, if these were away, find a far more deadly vent; they solve that great problem how to excite a safe and regulated political activity.

We also in the course of the week have been travelling on the great railway from Manchester to Birmingham. The distance is ninety-five miles, which we accomplished in five hours. Nothing can be more delightful, as well as more convenient. It was very beautiful too, to be taken as it were, into the deepest retirement of the country, surprising lone farm-houses and outlying copses with the rapid darting by of a hundred passengers, yet leaving their quiet unbroken; for no houses have as yet gathered on the line of the railway, and no miscellaneous passers at all times of the day and night serve to keep it ever in public. Only at intervals, four or five times a day, there rushes by the long train of carriages, and then all is as quiet as before.

We also passed through London, with which I was once so familiar; and which now I almost gaze at with the wonder of a stranger. That enormous city, grand beyond all other earthly grandeur, sublime with the sublimity of the sea or of mountains, is yet a place that I should be most sorry to call my home. In fact its greatness repels the notion of home; it may be a palace, but it cannot be a home. How different from the mingled greatness and sweetness of our mountain valleys; and yet he who were strong in body and mind ought to desire rather, if he must do one, to spend all his life in London, than all his life in Westmoreland. For not yet can energy and rest be united in one, and this is not our time and place for rest, but for energy.

2.

Chartres, August, 1837.

Chartres was a very fine termination of our tour. We stopped at the Hotel du Grand Monarque, on an

open space just at the outside of the town, and from thence immediately made our way to the Cathedral. The high tower, so celebrated all over France, is indeed remarkably beautiful; but the whole church far surpassed my expectations. The portails of both transepts are rich in figures as large as life, like the great portail at Rheims; the rose windows over them are very rich, and the windows all over the church are most rich in painted glass. The size is great, a very essential element, I think, in the merits of a cathedral, and all the back of the choir was adorned with groups of figures in very high relief, which had an extremely fine effect. These are all the proper and perpetual beauties of Chartres Cathedral; but we happened to see it on the Festival of the Assumption, when the whole church was full of people in every part, when the service was going on in the choir, and the whole building was ringing with the peals of the organ, and with the voices of the numerous congregation. Unchristian as was the service, so that one could have no sympathy with it in itself, yet it was delightful to contrast the crowded state of the huge building,-nave, transepts and aisles, all swarming with people, and the sharing of all in the service, with the nakedness of our own cathedrals, where all, except the choir, is now merely a monument of architecture. There is no more provoking confusion to my mind, than that which is often made between the magnificence and beauty of the Romish Church and its superstitions. No one abhors more than I do the essence of Popery, i. e. Priestcraft; or the setting up a quantity of human mediators, interpreters, between God and man. But this is retained by those false Protestants who call themselves High Churchmen; while they have sacrificed of Popery only its better and more popular parts; its beauty and its impressiveness. On the other hand, the Puritans and Evangelicals, whilst they disclaim Popery, undervalue the authority and power of the Church, not of the Clergy, and have a bibliolatry, especially towards the Old Testament, quite as foolish and as mis

chievous as the superstition of the Catholics. The open churches, the varied services, the beautiful solemnities, the processions, the Calvaries, the crucifixes, the appeals to the eye and ear through which the heart is reached most effectually, have no natural connexion with superstition. People forget that Christian worship is in its essence spiritual,—that is, it depends for its efficacy on no circumstances of time or place or form,—but that Christianity itself has given us the best helps towards making our worship spiritual to us, that is, sincere and lively, by the visible images and signs which it has given us of God and of heavenly things; namely, the Person of the Man Christ Jesus, and the Sacraments.

To forbear, therefore, from all use of the Humanity of Christ, as an aid to our approaching in heart to the Invisible Father, is surely to forfeit one of the merciful purposes of the Incarnation, and to fall a little into that one great extreme of error, the notion that man can either in his understanding, or in his heart, approach to the Eternal and Invisible God, without the aid of a μeríτns or "interpres;" (the English word, " Mediator," has become so limited in its sense, that it does not reach to the whole extent of the case,) we want not an interpreter only, but a medium of communication,-some middle point, in which the intelligible may unite with the perfections of the unintelligible, and so may prepare us hereafter to understand Him who is now unintelligible.

I think that this is important, for many reasons, both as regards Popery and our Pseudo-Popery, and Evangelicalism and Unitarianism. The errors of all four seem to flow out of a confusion as to the great truth of our need of a MEσiτns, and of the various ways in which Christ is our One μɛoiτns, and that with infinite perfectness.

VIII. TOUR IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.

Paris, July 14, 1839.

1.

But really, when we went out on these leads, and looked down on the whole mass of the trees of the Tuilleries' garden, forming a luxuriant green bed below us, and saw over them the gilded dome of the Invalids, and the mass of the Tuilleries, and the rows of orange trees, and the people sitting at their ease amongst them, and the line of the street not vanishing, as in London, in a thick cloud of smoke or fog, but with the white houses as far as the eye could reach distinct on the sky, and that sky just in the western line of the street, one blaze of gold from the setting sun,-not a weak watery sun, but one so mighty that his setting was like the death of a Cæsar or a Napoleon,―of one mighty for good and for evil,—of one to be worshipped by ignorant men, either as God or Demon,—one hardly knew whether to rejoice or to grieve at his departure ;-when we saw all this, we could not but feel that Paris is full of the most poetical beauty.

Cosne, July 16, 1839.

2. . . . . The wide landscape under this bright sky looks more than joyous, and the sun in his unobstructed course is truly giant-like. Here one can understand how men came to worship the sun, and to depict him with all images of power and of beauty,-armed with his resistless arrows, yet the source of life and light. And yet feeling, as none can feel more strongly, the evils of the state of England, yet one cannot but see also, that the English are a greater people than these,―more like, that is, one of the chosen people of history, who are appointed to do a great work for mankind. We are over bustling, but there is less activity here, without more repose. But, however," it is not expedient, doubtless ;" and have not we failed to improve the wonderful talents which have been given to us?

Arles, July 20, 1839.

3. We have just been walking round this town, after having first been down to the Rhone, and had a bathe in him, which, as we had seen so much of him, was, I thought, only a proper compliment to him. But I ought to go back in order, dearest M, to the Pope's palace at Avignon,

There was an old porter,

only this heat makes me lazy. who opened to us the first gate, and led us into an enormous court full of soldiers, for it is now used as a barrack; then he opened a door into a long gallery,—perhaps 100 feet long,-through which we were to pass...

The rooms beyond were scenes not to be forgotten :-prisons where unhappy men had engraved their names on the stones, and mottoes, mostly from Scripture, expressing their patience and their hope. One man had carved simply our Lord's name, as if it gave him a comfort to write it; there was I. H. S., and nothing more. Some of these dens had been the torture-rooms, and one was so contrived in the roof and walls as to deaden all sound; while in another there was a huge stone trough, in which the question, "à l'eau bouillante" used to be put; and in yet another the roof was still blackened by the fires in which the victims had been burnt alive. One of these same rooms, long since disused by the Inquisition, had been chosen as the prison and scene of the murder of the victims of the aristocratical party in the massacre in 1790; and in it there was a sort of trap-door, through which the bodies were thrown down into the lowest room of the tower, which was then used as an ice-house. And the walls of the intermediate room were visibly streaked with the blood of those who were so thrown down after they had been massacred a.

4.

July, 1839.

. . We are now between the Lion d'Or and Salon, on the famous Plaine de Crau, or Plain of Stones,

a See Letter in p. 165.