English than the latter. The social heart of the
colony clings fast to the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the
political tendency may be; and the public monuments and inscriptions
celebrate this affectionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened by the epitaphs of those
whose lives 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, whiskeyfie