s will arrive at a result or two. The
Unveracities, escorted, each Unveracity of them by its
corresponding Misery and Penalty; the Phantasms, and Fatuities,
and ten-years Corn-Law Debatings, that shall walk the Earth at
noonday,--must needs be numerous! The Universe _being_
intrinsically a Perhaps, being too probably an 'infinite Humbug,'
why should any minor Humbug astonish us? It is all according to
the order of Nature; and Phantasms riding with huge clatter
along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish
nobody. Enchanted St. Ives' Workhouses and Joe-Manton
Aristocracies; giant Working Mammonism near strangled in the
partridge-nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism,--this, in all
its branches, in its thousand thousand modes and figures, is a
sight familiar to us.

The Popish Religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these
years; and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with
at present. _"Elle a trois cents ans dans le ventre,"_ counts M.
Jouffroy; _"c'est pourquoi je la respecte!"_--The old Pope of
Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him
through the streets to bless the people on _Corpus-Christi_ Day,
complains of rheumatism; whereupon his Cardinals consult;--
construct him, after some study, a stuffed cloaked figure, of
iron and wood, with wool or baked hair; and place it in a
kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure; to this
stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by
the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread
hands: the rump with its cloaks kneels, the Pope looks, and
holds his hands spread; and so the two in concert bless the
Roman population on _Corpus-Christi_ Day, as well as they can.

I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-iron
back, with the flesh head and hands; and endeavoured to
calculate his horoscope. I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff
that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself in the human
retina, for these several thousand years. Nay, since Chaos first
shivered, and 'sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft
of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of
Nature and Art working together? Here is a Supreme Priest who
believes God to be--What in the name of God _does_ he believe God
to be?--and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic
phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, Gregorian Chants,
mass-brayings, pu