ives were passed in the joint service of England and her loyal
child; and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy with the
sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in that attitude of proud
reverence. Here, at least, was a people not cut off from its past, but
holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for us only in
history. It gave a glamour of olden time to the new land; it touched the
prosaic democratic present with the waning poetic light of the
aristocratic and monarchical tradition. There was here and there a title
on the tablets, and there was everywhere the formal language of loyalty
and of veneration for things we have tumbled into the dust. It is a
beautiful church, of admirable English Gothic; if you are so happy, you
are rather curtly told you may enter by a burly English figure in some
kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and within its quiet precincts you
may feel yourself in England if you like,--which, for my part, I do not.
Neither did our friends enjoy it so much as the Church of the Jesuits,
with its more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoed ceiling, its
architectural taste of subdued Renaissance, and its black-eyed
peasant-girl telling her beads before a side altar, just as in the
enviably deplorable countries we all love; nor so much even as the Irish
cathedral which they next visited. That is a very gorgeous cathedral
indeed, painted and gilded 'a merveille', and everywhere stuck about with
big and little saints and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly bad--but
for those in the French cathedral. There is, of course, a series
representing Christ's progress to Calvary; and there was a very tattered
old man,--an old man whose voice had been long ago drowned in whiskey,
and who now spoke in a ghostly whisper,--who, when he saw Basil's eye
fall upon the series, made him go the round of them, and tediously
explained them.

"Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and then pay him for it?"
Isabel asked.

"O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindles of other lands and days,
that I couldn't help it," he answered; and straightway in the eyes of
both that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to
the glorious likeness of an Italian beggar.

They were always doing something of this kind, those absurdly sentimental
people, whom yet I cannot find it in my heart to blame for their folly,
though I could name ever so many reasons for rebuking it. Why, in fa