convert either me or any other good sportsman.

'By the bye, my dear fellow, was I asleep or awake when I seemed to
read in the postscript of your last letter, something about "being
driven to Rome after all"? . . . Why thither, of all places in
heaven or earth? You know, I have no party interest in the
question. All creeds are very much alike to me just now. But allow
me to ask, in a spirit of the most tolerant curiosity, what possible
celestial bait, either of the useful or the agreeable kind, can the
present excellent Pope, or his adherents, hold out to you in
compensation for the solid earthly pudding which you would have to
desert? . . . I daresay, though, that I shall not comprehend your
answer when it comes. I am, you know, utterly deficient in that
sixth sense of the angelic or supralunar beautiful, which fills your
soul with ecstasy. You, I know, expect and long to become an angel
after death: I am under the strange hallucination that my body is
part of me, and in spite of old Plotinus, look with horror at a
disembodiment till the giving of that new body, the great perfection
of which, in your eyes, and those of every one else, seems to be,
that it will be less, and not more of a body, than our present one.
. . . Is this hope, to me at once inconceivable and contradictory,
palpable and valuable enough to you to send you to that Italian
Avernus, to get it made a little more certain? If so, I despair of
your making your meaning intelligible to a poor fellow wallowing,
like me, in the Hylic Borboros--or whatever else you may choose to
call the unfortunate fact of being flesh and blood. . . . Still,
write.'