When I grow thoughtful over all these works of art and objets de piete—­engravings, lithographs, statuettes, crucifixes, crosses worked in wool, stables of Bethlehem, little holy-water stoops, and the faded photographs belonging to the early period of the art (portraits, no doubt, of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces, all revealing that air of rusticity in Sunday clothes which is not to be mistaken)—­I have before me the whole story of a simple life, surrounding itself year after year with fresh emblems and tokens of the hope that reaches beyond the grave, and the affections of nature that become woven on this side of it, and which mingle joy and sorrow even in the cup of a village priest.

It is in these quiet, provincial places, where existence goes on in the old-fashioned, humdrum way, that people take care of their household property, and respect the sentiment that years lay up in it:  they hand it down to the next generation as they received it.  Little objects of common ornament, of religious or intellectual pleasure, thus preserved, throw in course of time a vivid light on human changes.

And it is this vivid light that I am now feeling in these dim rooms.  I am aware that nearly everything here is the record of an epoch to which I do not belong—­that the world’s mind has undergone a great change even in the provinces since the influence that comes forth from these silent traces of past thought were in harmony with it.  What interests me more than anything else here is an allegorical or mystical map, designed, drawn, and coloured with all the patience and much of the artistic skill of an illuminating monk of the thirteenth century.  I doubt if in any presbytery far out in the marshes or on the mountains a priest could now be found with the motive to undertake such a task.  It belongs to the same order of ideas as the ’Pilgrim’s Progress.’  In this map one sees the ‘States of Charity,’ the ’Province of Fervour,’ the ‘Empire of Self-Contempt,’ and other countries belonging to a vast continent, of which the centre is the ’Kingdom of the Love of God,’ connected to a smaller continent—­that of the world—­by a narrow neck of land called the ‘Isthmus of Charity.’  In the continent of the world are shown the ‘Mountain of Ingratitude,’ the ‘Hills of Frivolity,’ the territory of ‘Ennui,’ of ‘Vanity,’ of ‘Melancholy,’ and of all the evil moods and vices to which men are liable.  Separated from the mainland, and washed by the ’Torrent of Bitterness,’ are the ‘Rocks of Remorse.’  Among the allegorical emblems in various parts of the chart is a very remarkable tree with blue trunk and rose-coloured leaves called the ‘Tree of Illusions.’  Far above it lies the ‘Peninsula of Perfection,’ and near to this, under a mediaeval drum-tower, is the gateway of the ‘City of Happiness.’