Again, I certainly (after some knowledge of strange facts) could have wished that Mr. Crookes’s philosophical spiritualism had met with a more patient hearing than Dr. Carpenter or Mr. Huxley offered at the time; and that Faraday’s clumsy mechanical refutation of table-turning had not been considered so conclusive.  For there really are “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” &c., than even your omniscience is aware of; and without pinning faith on Madame Blavatsky, or Mr. Hume, or any other wonder-worker from America or Thibet, there doubtless are petty miracles in what is called spiritualism (possibly some form of electricity) that demand more scrutiny than our materialists will have the patience to vouchsafe:  I for one believe in human testimony even as to the miraculous.

For a third and last inquiry:  justly indignant at the horrors of Continental vivisection, and especially in our own humane England at Dr. Ferrier’s red-hot wires thrust into live monkeys’ brains, I have often vainly asked cui bono such terrible cruelty?  The highest authorities are at variance with each other as to the practical utility in human therapeutics of experiments upon agonised brutes; but all must be agreed that, so far as morals are concerned, vivisection only hardens the heart and sears the feelings and conscience of doctors who may surround the dying-bed of our dearest, and very possibly make capital of peculiar symptoms in their patient, by experiments transferred from dogs and rabbits to himself!  Single votes are useless against the annual list of selected candidates, or I for one would have at all inconvenience testified both at Oxford and in the Royal Society against the election of a certain Professor whose glory lies in vivisection.

For an appropriate end to these discursive sentences, let me add this poetic morsel in my own vein.  Mr. Butler of Philadelphia was quite right in his judgment of my indoles:  I “write by impulse on occasion.”  Here is a very recent instance in point.  I had lately visited Mr. Barraud’s painted-window works near Seven Dials, and when I told Mr. Herbert Rix, our Assistant-Secretary, of what you may read below, he exhorted me to put it into verse, which I did impromptu, and sent it to him:  now thus first printed:—­

    “I saw the artist in a colour-shop
    Staining some bits of glass variously shaped
    To map the painted window of a church,
    And marvelled that the tintings all seemed wrong;
    Red, green, and brown should have been interchanged
    To show the colours right.  Why did he use
    His brush so carelessly, my folly asked. 
    ’Wait for the fire,—­the fire will make all right,
    The reds and greens and browns will change again,
    Fusing harmoniously,’ so Knowledge spake;
    And thus a thought of wisdom came to me
    Touching the truth, how kindly curative
    Must be the pains and cares and griefs of life,