y
the _Life_,--much as a shying horse looks at a post. In truth, I am
afraid of him. I enjoy and admire him so much, and feel I could so
easily be tempted to go along with him. And yet I have a deeply rooted
and old persuasion that he was the most splendid of anachronisms. A
thoroughly, nay intensely Pagan Life, in an age when it is men's duty
to be Christian. I therefore never take him up without a kind of inward
check, as if I were trying some forbidden spell; while, on the other
hand, there is so infinitely much to be learnt from him, and it is
so needful to understand the world we live in, and our own age, and
especially its greatest minds, that I cannot bring myself to burn my
books as the converted Magicians did, or sink them as did Prospero.
There must, as I think, have been some prodigious defect in his mind, to
let him hold such views as his about women and some other things; and
in another respect, I find so much coldness and hollowness as to the
highest truths, and feel so strongly that the Heaven he looks up to is
but a vault of ice,--that these two indications, leading to the same
conclusion, go far to convince me he was a profoundly immoral and
irreligious spirit, with as rare faculties of intelligence as ever
belonged to any one. All this may be mere _goody_ weakness and twaddle,
on my part: but it is a persuasion that I cannot escape from; though I
should feel the doing so to be a deliverance from a most painful load.
If you could help me, I heartily wish you would. I never take him up
without high admiration, or lay him down without real sorrow for what he
chose to be.

"I have been reading nothing else that you would much care for.
Southey's _Amadis_ has amused me; and Lyell's _Geology_ interested me.
The latter gives one the same sort of bewildering view of the abysmal
extent of Time that Astronomy does of Space. I do not think I shall take
your advice as to learning Portuguese. It is said to be very ill spoken
here; and assuredly it is the most direful series of nasal twangs I ever
heard. One gets on quite well with English.

"The people here are, I believe, in a very low condition; but they do
not appear miserable. I am told that the influence of the priests makes
the peasantry all Miguelites; but it is said that nobody wants any more
revolutions. There is no appearance of riot or crime; and they are all
extremely civil. I was much interested by learning that Columbus once
lived here, before he fo