in the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' when the burthen drops off his back, is but a type of such a deliverance."* Come! let us laugh at the old worldly modes, power. And in the meadows look upon the flower What a charming picture is that the laureate has painted, of his "Arthur" escaping for a breathing-time to the country, and shaking to all the liberal air the dust, and din, and steam of town: O joy to him in this retreat To drink the cooler air, and mark The sweep of scythe in morning dew, We have seen how Alton Locke yearned from childhood for escape from city durance vile; it is refreshing to see him actually emerging at last from that wilderness of brick. Gradually the people whom he passed began to look more and more rural; the houses ended, cattle-yards and farm-buildings appeared; and right and left, far away, spread the low rolling sheet of green meadows and corn-fields. The picture, like that in Thomas Hood's poems,§ is of one That fled from Babel-strife To the green sabbath-land of life, To dodge dull Care 'mid clustered trees, And cool his forehead in the breeze. Oh, the joy to Alton Locke of this new existence, in another and a better world! The lawns with their high elms and firs, the green hedgerows, the delicate hue and scent of the fresh clover-fields, the steep clay banks where he stopped to pick nosegays of wild flower, and became again a child-the glittering brooks, and hills quivering in the green haze, while above hung the skylarks, pouring out their souls in melody-" and then as the sun grew hot, and the larks dropped one by one into the growing corn, the new delight of the blessed silence! I listened to the stillness; for noise had been my native element; I had become in London quite unconscious of the ceaseless roar of the human sea, casting up mire and dirt. And now, for the first time in my life, the crushing, confusing hubbub had flowed away, and left my brain calm and free."|| Of few indeed can it be said, whose tense is the future in rus, that they Drink such joy as doth a pale And dim-eyed worker, who escapes, in Spring, * Rob. Southey to John Kenyon, August 19, 1820. Alton Locke, ch. xi. § The Departure of Summer. ¶ Alexander Smith, A Life-Drama, Sc. 2. REGENERATED ALMACK'S. A FEUILLE VOLANTE ON A PET FOLLY OF THE SEASON. "HYPOCRISY in one age is generally succeeded by atheism in another," says Addison. If his saying be right, as the histories of most nations would prove it, and it be, indeed, true that the pharisaism of one age is avenged by the licence of its successors, as Hoffmann avenged himself by Bedlam jubilees in his manhood for the asceticism to which the Justizrath condemned his youth, certainly the next generation will have to out-Paine Tom Paine to produce a reaction at all proportionate to the professed sanctity of ours! In this day people think it necessary to profess so much, that in the coming age I am afraid they will naturally take a reprisal, and profess nothing, as the nation, weary of the starched bands and psalmody of Whitehall in the Protectorate, rushed to the opposite extreme, and drank and gamed, swore and feasted, intrigued and gambled in unbridled liberty at Whitehall in the Restoration. Is it to be expected otherwise? If one man or one age be a saint through hypocrisy, does it not follow, as a natural course, that their son or their successor becomes an atheist in sheer honesty and disgust? We know that the wildest of all the sceptics, voluptuaries, and dare-devils of his time was Tom Wharton, who was reared amidst the gloomy rituals and chill severities of his puritan relatives; and none can wonder if the Publican, seeing the Pharisee beating his breast, and spreading out his phylacteries, and wearying Heaven with his vainglorious jargon, should say in his haste, All men are liars-prayer is cant. I will have none of it!" I thought of the old Spectator's axiom a little time ago, reading in the papers of that pet folly of our past season, the Special Services for the Upper Classes at Almack's: that last new blast from the trumpet with which religion in these days sees fit to herald her steps, by much such a boastful and discordant fanfare as proclaims the advent of Punch in the streets or of the sweeps on May-day. People have long learned to bridle their coughs till Mr. Spurgeon gives the word of action, advertisements of bishops' sermons appear in our morning journals just above the programme of a Floral fête, and prospectuses of Dr. Cumming's or Mr. Bellew's lectures are pasted on our walls side by side with the attractions of Christy's minstrels or Cremorne divertissemens, while theatres that resound on Saturday night with Robson's jokes and the uproar of the gods re-echo on Sunday morning with texts and hynody that decree the trade of the sock and buskin, thrice accursed. We had grown inured to all that. But Almack's turned into a place of worship! Surely the Church must be tottering, indeed, if she cannot stand without crutches made out of ball-room chairs, and must know that her own lamps are burning dim since she must needs borrow the gas radiance from the chandeliers of her old foe the world. True, she has always asked the loan of our singers for her sacred concerts and oratorios, putting up with their "objectionable occupation" for the sake of the money their voices bring her; and never says "no" to our sovereigns, even though won at Homburg or Lansquenet, when proffered for her Bible Societies or her stained windows, to whatever perdition she may consign our souls. But an invasion of Willis's Rooms is a step before which one would have fancied she might have paused, strange and bizarre means though she has taken of late to thrust her tenets down our throats, without regard to how she may chance to weaken or to desecrate her cause. Throngs of carriages, we read this season, stood before the doors of Willis's Rooms, when peers and peeresses, members and belles, highly educated men and women, thronged, not, for once, for a ball, but for a prayer-meeting, in which a gentleman recalled how much he had enjoyed dancing there in days bygone, but assured them there was a higher pleasure in looking after your soul than in practising the Deux Temps, contrasted the respective merits of Piety v. Waltzing, and then-read the eighth chapter of St. Luke, the connexion between which and the saltatory art (as it contains no allusion to Herodius's daughter) I confess I was at a loss to discover. A prayer meeting at Almack's! It sounds oddly-almost, to us godless people of the world, irreverent! though doubtless that is a mere qualm, a fancy, a bêtise, a quibble of Mephistophelian parentage, similar to that which makes us impatient of laws laid down to us by boy preachers of five-and-twenty, and unable to perceive why every vulgar simile that rises to the lips of a petted Oracle, as he struts on the platform of his tabernacle, must needs be "inspiration!" A prayer-meeting at Al. mack's! What a subject for Hogarth, were he here; for Swift, with his stinging satire; for Walpole, with his cynical sneer! What a mot Sheridan would have made on it, what a maxim Rochefoucauld, what a bitter truth La Bruyère! And I think even those stern progenitors of the Church themselves, Luther, and Melancthon, and Knox, would have joined the satirists and the hommes du monde, and would have sickened and turned away with a sneer from the religion that can only limp along by the aid of two broken crutches-Parade and Profession! A prayer meeting at Almack's! What a touching scene! Fancy the Doxology echoing from walls that usually resound with the music of the "Express" or the "Power of Love" waltz. Picture the crême de la crême confessing their sins in the rooms where they have fluttered, flattered, and flirted the week before, and hope to flutter, flatter, and flirt again scores of times more! Imagine Tinless (M.P. for Blarneyshire) joining in texts that forbid the worship of mammon in the salons where yesterday he proposed to Miss Ingotts for the sake of her 80,000Z. that is to clear him from the Jews; Lady Blanche opening her illuminated prayer-book, and making a tableau vivant of piety on the spot where, the night after, she whispered away her bosom friend's character, and gave a rendezvous to her Millamont; Sir Ormolu Vernie, the millionnaire, bowing his venerable head over prayer, while in his coat-pocket lay scrip that would add to his heavy bank balance, n'importe if it ruined some thousands of his beloved brothers in Christ; Mrs. Priedieu, moved to tears by the orator's words, giving her Saturday mornings in town to repent of her sins, though down in the country she passes her Sundays in yawns and French romans.-Imagine them all gathered at Almack's! Positively, it reminds one of the Jubilée Universel et Purificateur, where, as we know, Madame de Soissons, Madame de Soubise, Madame de Montespan, the Princesse de Monaco, and all the dames de la cour, humbled themselves in sackcloth and ashes one minute and danced in diamonds and dentelles the next, and considered their piety an affaire accomplie because they had made a parade of their penitence. You remember that jubilee recorded as its fruits, "six présidentes ont quitté le Rouge, et la Maréchale d'Humières le Jeu!" I have not heard if the special service at regenerated Almack's has published, now the season is over, such magnificent results. But the Paris of Louis Quatorze was more reverent in one thing than the London of ours ;-for its day of humiliation it did not borrow the ballroom at Versailles; it went to Notre Dame, not to the Galerie des Glaces. There were throngs of carriages to the special services-pour cause, they went for a novelty. The novelty of place or preacher draws, and those who run to find amusement for hours that hang heavy, or to get a Christian aroma cheaply, pass muster as "eminently pious people." Ab, mes amis, there is as much dissipation in religion as in anything under the sun, but it passes by a legitimate name, and goes unreproved accordingly. It is one of the fevers of the day, fed by a craving for notoriety and for "something new," but as it is a disease that is fancied heavensent, it would be considered profane to attempt to cure it, or to bring those who nurse and imbibe it into a stronger, fresher, better air. What need, I wonder, was there for that good gentleman who officiated at Willis's Rooms, to trot out his feelings to an audience of strangers? If his conscience was so peculiarly constituted that the sins of his past waltzes lay heavily on it, was there any occasion to tell the world that? If real crimes lay between him and his God (as they do, I take it, more or less, between every man and his Creator), he could surely have repented of them without making society at large his confidant, and publishing a bead-roll of them? When a man grieves most, then, is he most usually silent; and these ostentatious and egotistical repentances make one think involuntarily of the old story of the man who preferred to be notorious for thieving than to get no notoriety at all. Orators and auditors alike make a stalking-horse of God, and a stock in trade of their sins and their salvations. Religion is the capital of most of its professors in our day; it helps them on in the world, or it fills their idle hours, or it gives them standing in the parish, or it furnishes a voucher, perhaps difficult to get by other means, of their respectability, and they pet and parade and make much of it accordingly. It is an orthodox and legitimate channel of excitement, and men crowd to drink at it, because to be seen on its banks gives an aroma of sanctity, as to be seen bathing in Jordan used to give to pilgrims of old, and draws attention from the cognac perfume which may linger on their lips from other defendues fountains, of which they would not have the world whisper that they even sipped. Professional men, whose incomes depend on the good word of others, find a religious reputation answers well, and passes them unquestioned past the sentinels of society, while to have their names down on the charitable lists of their parish is the best veil to draw over their short-comings and peculations, and the best rose to hang over the lintel of their doors that the unholier banqueting within may go unnoticed. Blasé women of the world, who have tried and tired of every other amusement, and who cease to care for society when they have ceased to shine in it, try religious excitement as a new sal volatile and a dernier ressort. Young girls find in it an unrebuked outlet for their enthusiasm and romance, in its authorised diversions and its permissible hero-worship, and may unreproved throw around their priests that idealic auréole they are not allowed without scandal to expend on any worthier idol. So!-religion is just now the hobby of the day, because it is profitable, fashionable, and expedient; and it is ridden like other hobbies, so hard that it becomes a laughing-stock-ridden securely and triumphantly, because no one is bold enough to point out its flaws, its follies, and its errors, and show how its riders, like Sancho Panza on his wooden horse, pretend to be flying heavenward, while they never leave the earth, and doggedly close their eyes to all that would convince them of their wilful and pretentious error. Très chers lecteurs! that special service at Almack's is a complete satire in itself; but, much as there is that is ludicrous in it, there is still more that is sad. Heraclitus and Democritus, had they been among us this season, might have exchanged their rôles at this new caprice of Belgravia; the one might have relaxed for once into a risus sardonicus, to see well-educated men and women of good society flocking to a clap-trap meeting as untaught peasants might flock to hear a drunken cobbler expounding from an inverted tub, to listen to a gentleman proclaiming the gate to heaven as though he had been its special porter, and respond to prayers they would never have stirred to hear but for the novelty of their being repeated in a ball-room; and the other might have stopped in his mirth to sigh over the giant evil of the day, of which this one, among other follies of our past season, was so admirable a type. Hypocrisy, La Rochefoucauld has it, is a homage that vice renders to virtue; but it is a homage more likely to dethrone virtue than any open rebellion against her; her counterfeits thrust more out of her courts than her enemies. The heart and mind of every man of sense must, I should say, sicken and revolt from the bombast and parade of religion in our day; he must sneer at it, and grieve at it in the same breath, and the more averse he be to irreverence or profanity, the less will he be able to give in his adhesion to it, or join in a profession and affectation of faith in which his conscience and his reason alike refuse to coincide; the less will he be able to see anything worthy either of God or of man in the egotistical fanfare, the thirst for novelty, the vulgar furore, the technical jargon that mark religion in the present time, and that draw a throng of carriages and converts round the sounding-board of some popular preacher, or the doors of some new style of pro tempo temple-the more novel the preacher, the more outré the temple ;-the more loud the praise, the more dense the throng. All the counsels of the founder of their creed are of equal value to his followers, I presume. Why is it, then, that those who drag into public things solemn and sacred, and make them subjects for newspaper advertisements and vulgar clap-trap, never remember certain passages in which it is advised to them to beware of scribes, who, for a show, make long prayers, and are counselled when they pray not to be as the hypocrites are, who pray standing in the synagogues that they may be seen of men, but to enter into their closet, and, when they have shut the door, pray to their Father in secret? Those counsels, I should suppose, are expunged from the meetings and the editions of the religious devotees of the day? The best logicians among them would find it hard to reconcile those injunctions with their practice; and to have to waste prayer or repentance unseen by men, would doubtless be as repugnant to the eminent Christians of England as it was of yore to the scribes and pharisees of |