t it would be
far better to share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and
benignant priest, like the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Miserables_,
than to hold these good opinions of Chaumette, as he held them,
with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of the rights
and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that
great and precious part of our nature that lies out of the domain
of the logical understanding.... In every family where a mother
sought to have her child baptised, or where sons and daughters
sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last
sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which
had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a
society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn
mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by
apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by
the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing
piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which
they had once served their holy office."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Misc._ i 77-79.]

Where is the effrontery, the search for methods in the Reign of
Terror, the applause for revolutionary models? Such inexcusable
perversion of a writer's meaning for an evanescent political
object--and a very shabby object too--is enough to make one think that
George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered
himself of the saying that "Politics are a trade for a rascal, not for
a gentleman."

Let me cite another more grotesque piece of irrelevancy with a similar
drift. Some months ago the present writer chanced to express an
opinion upon Welsh Disestablishment. Wales, at any rate, would seem to
be far enough away from _Emile, Candide_, the Law of Prairial, and the
Committee of Public Safety. The _Times_, however, instantly said[1]
that it would be affectation to express any surprise, because my
unfortunate "theories and principles, drawn from French sources
and framed on French models, all tend to the disintegration of
comprehensive political organisations and the encouragement of
arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race or dialect." Was
there ever in the world such prodigious nonsense? What French sources,
what French models? If French models point in any