misery and penalty; the phantasms and fatuities, and ten-years’ corn-law debatings, that shall walk the earth at noonday, must needs be numerous!  The universe being intrinsically a perhaps, being too probably an ’infinite humbug,’ why should any minor humbug astonish us?  It is all according to the order of nature; and phantasms riding with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish nobody.  Enchanted St Ives’ workhouses and Joe Manton aristocracies; giant-working mammonism near strangled in the partridge nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism—­this, in all its branches, in its thousand thousand modes and figures, is a sight familiar to us.”—­P. 185.

What is to be said of writing such as this!  For ourselves, we hurry on with a sort of incredulity, scarce believing that it is set down there for our steady perusal; we tread lightly over these “Phantasms” and “Unveracities,” and “Double-barrelled Dilettantism,” (another favourite phrase of his—­pity it is not more euphonious—­but none of his coinage rings well,) we step on, we say, briskly, in the confident hope of soon meeting something—­if only a stroke of humour—­which shall be worth pausing for.  Accordingly in the very page where our extract stopped, in the very next paragraph, comes a description of a certain pope most delectable to read.  As it is but fair that our readers should enjoy the same compensation as ourselves, we insert it in a note.[69]

[Footnote 69:  “The Popish religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these years, and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with at present. ‘Elle a trois cents ans dans le ventre,’ counts M. Jouffroy; ‘c’est pourquoi je la respecte!’ The old Pope of Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him through the streets to bless the people on Corpus-Christi day, complains of rheumatism; whereupon his cardinals consult—­construct him, after some study, a stuffed, cloaked figure, of iron and wood, with wool or baked hair, and place it in a kneeling posture.  Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure; to this stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread hands:  the rump, with its cloaks, kneels; the Pope looks, and holds his hands spread; and so the two in concert bless the Roman population on Corpus-Christi day, as well as they can.

“I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-iron back, with the flesh head and hands, and endeavoured to calculate his horoscope.  I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God’s daylight, or painted himself in the human retina, for these several thousand years.  Nay, since Chaos first shivered, and ‘sneezed,’ as the Arabs say, with the first shaft of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of nature and art working together?  Here is a supreme priest who believes God to be—­what, in the name of God, does he believe God to be?—­and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax candles, organ blasts, Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps, artistically spread out, to save the ignorant from worse....