rry him off to their den. They kept the same
respectable distance from the Austrian cannon; and these were no painted
terrors. And as regards the Cathedral, scarce a solitary foot crossed
its threshold, though there,--astounding prodigy!--He who made the
worlds was Himself made many times every day by the priests. But Punch
had a dense crowd of delighted spectators around him; and yet he
competed with the priest at immense disadvantage. Punch played his part
in a humble wooden shed, while the priest played his in a magnificent
marble Cathedral, with a splendid wardrobe to boot. Still the people
seemed to feel, that the only play in which there was any earnestness
was that which was enacted in the wooden box. A stranger from India or
China, who was not learned in either the religion or the drama of
Europe, would probably have been unable to see any great difference
between the two, and would have taken both for religious performances;
concluding, perhaps, that that in the Cathedral was the established
form, while that in the wooden box was the disestablished; in short,
that Punch had been a priest at some former period of his life, and sung
mass and sold indulgences; but that, imbibing some heterodox notions, or
having fallen into some peccadillo, such as eating flesh on Friday, he
had been unfrocked and driven out, and compelled to play the priest in a
wooden tabernacle.

To return once more to the paintings and woodcuts illustrative of the
punitive and purgative processes of purgatory, and which were in a style
of art that demonstratively shows, that if Italy is advancing in the
knowledge of a future life, she is retrograding in the arts of the
present,--to recur, I say, to these, there rested some doubt, to say the
least of it, over their revelations of the world to come; but there
rested no doubt whatever over their revelations of the present condition
of Church and State in Italy. On this head the cannon and woodcuts told
far more than the priests wished, or perhaps thought. They showed that
both the State and the Church in that country are now reduced to their
_ultima ratio_, brute force. The State has lost all hope of governing
its subjects by giving them good laws, and inspiring them with loyalty;
and the Church has long since abandoned the plan of producing obedience
and love by presenting great truths to the mind. Both have found out a
shorter and more compendious policy. The State, speaking through her
cannon,