I Could Think Of Nothing But Apollyon Amusing Himself At The Expense Of The Poor Pilgrims In The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death; For The Exhibition Was Persisted In With A Pertinacity Inscrutable To Any Wisdom Except His Own.

It ended by a brace of thumps on the wall, each of which produced a report equal to a cannon; and with this salvo of artillery the exhibition finished.

This worthy guide is truly a sublime character. Long may he live to show the Pantheon; and when he dies, if so disagreeable an event must be contemplated, may he have the whole of one of these stone chambers to himself; for nothing less could possibly contain him. He regretted exceedingly that we could not go up into the dome; but I had had enough of stair climbing at Strasbourg, Antwerp, and Cologne, and not even the prospect of enjoying his instructions could tempt me.

Now this Pantheon seems to me a monument of the faults and the weakness of this very agreeable nation. Its history shows their enthusiasm, their hero worship, and the want of stable religious convictions. Nowhere has there been such a want of reverence for the Creator, unless in the American Congress. The great men of France have always seemed to be in confusion as to whether they made God or he made them. There is a great resemblance in some points between the French and the ancient Athenians: there was the same excitability; the same keen outward life; the same passion for ideas; the same spending of life in hearing or telling some new thing; the same acuteness of philosophical research. The old Athenians first worshipped, and then banished their great men, - buried them and pulled them up, and did generally a variety of things which we Anglo-Saxons should call fantastic. There is this difference, that the Athenians had the advantage of coming first. The French nation, born after this development, are exposed by their very similarity of conformation, and their consequent sympathy with the old classic style of feeling, to become imitators. This betrays itself in their painters and sculptors, and it is a constant impulse to a kind of idolatry, which is not in keeping with this age, and necessarily seems absurd. When the Greeks built altars to Force, Beauty, Victory, and other abstract ideas, they were doing an original thing. When the French do it, they imitate the Greeks. Apotheosis and hero worship in the old times had a freshness to it; it was one of the picturesque effects of the dim and purple shadows of an early dawning, when objects imperfectly seen are magnified in their dimensions; but the apotheosis, in modern times, of a man who has worn a dress coat, wig, and shoes is quite another affair.

I do not mean either to say, as some do, that the French mind has very little of the religious element. The very sweetest and softest, as well as the most austere and rigid type of piety has been given by the French mind; witness Fenelon and John Calvin - Fenelon standing as the type of the mystic, and Calvin of the rationalistic style of religion. Fenelon, with his heart so sweet, so childlike, so simple and tender, was yet essentially French in his nature, and represented one part of French mind; and what English devotional writer is at all like him? John Newton had his simplicity and lovingness, but wanted that element of gracefulness and classic sweetness which gave so high a tone to the writings of Fenelon.

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