shovel off cartloads from this place, and not miss it."

"If you had your way," answered Charles, "you would scrape off the roads
till there was nothing to walk on. We are forced to walk on what you
call humbug; we put it under our feet, but we use it."

"I cannot think that; it's like doing evil that good may come. I see
shams everywhere. I go into St. Mary's, and I hear men spouting out
commonplaces in a deep or a shrill voice, or with slow, clear, quiet
emphasis and significant eyes--as that Bampton preacher not long ago,
who assured us, apropos of the resurrection of the body, that 'all
attempts to resuscitate the inanimate corpse by natural methods had
hitherto been experimentally abortive.' I go into the place where
degrees are given--the Convocation, I think--and there one hears a deal
of unmeaning Latin for hours, graces, dispensations, and proctors
walking up and down for nothing; all in order to keep up a sort of ghost
of things passed away for centuries, while the real work might be done
in a quarter of an hour. I fall in with this Bateman, and he talks to me
of rood-lofts without roods, and piscinae without water, and niches
without images, and candlesticks without lights, and masses without
Popery; till I feel, with Shakespeare, that 'all the world's a stage.'
Well, I go to Shaw, Turner, and Brown, very different men, pupils of Dr.
Gloucester--you know whom I mean--and they tell us that we ought to put
up crucifixes by the wayside, in order to excite religious feeling."

"Well, I really think you are hard on all these people," said Charles;
"it is all very much like declamation; you would destroy externals of
every kind. You are like the man in one of Miss Edgeworth's novels, who
shut his ears to the music that he might laugh at the dancers."

"What is the music to which I close my ears?" asked Sheffield.

"To the meaning of those various acts," answered Charles; "the pious
feeling which accompanies the sight of the image is the music."

"To those who have the pious feeling, certainly," said Sheffield; "but
to put up images in England in order to create the feeling is like
dancing to create music."

"I think you are hard upon England," replied Charles; "we are a
religious people."

"Well, I will put it differently: do _you_ like music?"

"You ought to know," said Charles, "whom I have frightened so often with
my fiddle."

"Do you like dancing?"

"To tell the truth," said Charles, "I don't."

"