least good to hear;--but this much any who care to use their common
sense modestly, cannot but admit, that unless they choose to try the
rough life of the Christian ages, they cannot understand its practical
consequences. You have all been taught by Lord Macaulay and his school
that because you have Carpets instead of rushes for your feet; and
Feather-beds instead of fern for your backs; and Kickshaws instead
of beef for your eating; and Drains instead of Holy Wells for your
drinking;--that, therefore, you are the Cream of Creation, and
every one of you a seven-headed Solomon. Stay in those pleasant
circumstances and convictions if you please; but don't accuse your
roughly bred and fed fathers of telling lies about the aspect the
earth and sky bore to _them_,--till you have trodden the earth as
they, barefoot, and seen the heavens as they, face to face. If you
care to see and to know for yourselves, you may do it with little
pains; you need not do any great thing, you needn't keep one eye open
and the other shut for ten years over a microscope, nor fight your way
through icebergs and darkness to knowledge of the _celestial_ pole.
Simply, do as much as king after king of the Saxons did,--put rough
shoes on your feet and a rough cloak on your shoulders, and walk to
Rome and back. Sleep by the roadside, when it is fine,--in the first
outhouse you can find, when it is wet; and live on bread and water,
with an onion or two, all the way; and if the experiences which you
will have to relate on your return do not, as may well be, deserve the
name of spiritual; at all events you will not be disposed to let other
people regard them either as Poetry or Fiction.

[Footnote 4: Not _Londinian_.]

With this warning, presently to be at greater length insisted on,
I trace for you, in Dean Stanley's words, which cannot be bettered