merry, grotesque, long-nosed creatures, some flame-coloured and long-tailed, some green and scaly, some plated like the armadillo, all going about their merciless work with infinite gusto and glee!  Here one picked at the white breast of a languid, tortured woman who lay bathed in flame; one with a glowing hook thrust a lamentable big-paunched wretch down into a bath of molten liquor; one with pleased intentness turned the handle of a churn, from the top of which protruded the head of a fair-haired boy, all distorted with pain and terror.  What could have been in the mind of the designer of these hateful scenes?  It is impossible to acquit him of a strong sense of the humorous.  Did he believe that such things were actually in progress in some infernal cavern, seven times heated?  I fear it may have been so.  And what of the effect upon the minds of the village folk who saw them day by day?  It would have depressed, one would think, an imaginative girl or boy into madness, to dream of such things as being countenanced by God for the heathen and the unbaptized, as well as for the cruel and sinful.  If the vile work had been represented as being done by cloudy, sombre, relentless creatures, it would have been more tolerable.  But these fantastic imps, as lively as grigs and full to the brim of wicked laughter, are certainly enjoying themselves with an extremity of delight of which no trace is to be seen in the mournful and heavily lined faces of the faithful.  Autres temps, autres moeurs!  Perhaps the simple, coarse mental palates of the village folk were none the worse for this realistic treatment of sin.  One wonders what the saintly and refined Keble, who spent many years of his life as his father’s curate here, thought of it all.  Probably his submissive and deferential mind accepted it as in some ecclesiastical sense symbolical of the merciless hatred of God for the desperate corruption of humanity.  It gave me little pleasure to connect the personality of Keble with the place, patient, sweet-natured, mystical, serviceable as he was.  It seems hard to breathe in the austere air of a mind like Keble’s, where the wind of the spirit blows chill down the narrow path, fenced in by the high, uncompromising walls of ecclesiastical tradition on the one hand, and stern Puritanism on the other.  An artificial type, one is tempted to say!—­and yet one ought never, I suppose, so to describe any flower that has blossomed fragrantly upon the human stock; any system that seems to extend a natural and instinctive appeal to certain definite classes of human temperament.

I sped pleasantly enough along the low, rich pastures, thick with hedgerow elms, to Lechlade, another pretty town with an infinite variety of habitations.  Here again is a fine ancient church with a comely spire, “a pretty pyramis of stone,” as the old Itinerary says, overlooking a charming gabled house, among walled and terraced gardens, with stone balls on the corner-posts and a quaint pavilion, the river running below; and so on to a bridge over the yet slender Thames, where the river water spouted clear and fragrant into a wide pool; and across the flat meadows, bright with kingcups, the spire of Lechlade towered over the clustered house-roofs to the west.