Nor do I," said Sheffield; "it makes me laugh to think what I have
done, when a boy, to escape dancing; there is something so absurd in it;
and one had to be civil and to duck to young girls who were either prim
or pert. I have behaved quite rudely to them sometimes, and then have
been annoyed at my ungentlemanlikeness, and not known how to get out of
the scrape."

"Well, I didn't know we were so like each other in anything," said
Charles; "oh, the misery I have endured, in having to stand up to dance,
and to walk about with a partner!--everybody looking at me, and I so
awkward. It has been a torture to me days before and after."

They had by this time come up to the foot of the rough rising ground
which leads to the sort of table-land on the edge of which Oxley is
placed; and they stood still awhile to see some equestrians take the
hurdles. They then mounted the hill, and looked back upon Oxford.

"Perhaps you call those beautiful spires and towers a sham," said
Charles, "because you see their tops and not their bottoms?"

"Whereabouts were we in our argument?" said the other, reminded that
they had been wandering from it for the last ten minutes. "Oh, I
recollect; I know what I was at. I was saying that you liked music, but
didn't like dancing; music leads another person to dance, but not you;
and dancing does not increase but diminishes the intensity of the
pleasure you find in music. In like manner, it is a mere piece of
pedantry to make a religious nation, like the English, more religious by
placing images in the streets; this is not the English way, and only
offends us. If it were our way, it would come naturally without any one
telling us. As music incites to dancing, so religion would lead to
images; but as dancing does not improve music to those who do not like
dancing, so ceremonies do not improve religion to those who do not like
ceremonies."

"Then do you mean," said Charles, "that the English Romanists are shams,
because they use crucifixes?"

"Stop there," said Sheffield; "now you are getting upon a different
subject. They believe that there is _virtue_ in images; that indeed is
absurd in them, but it makes them quite consistent in honouring them.
They do not put up images as outward shows, merely to create feelings in
the minds of beholders, as Gloucester would do, but they in good,
downright earnest worship images, as being more than they seem, as being
not a mere outside show. They pay them a reli