True it is, the only profane diversions of this place are a
puppet-show and a mountebank; but then their religion affords a
perpetual comedy. Their high masses, their feasts, their
processions, their pilgrimages, confessions, images, tapers,
robes, incense, benedictions, spectacles, representations, and
innumerable ceremonies, which revolve almost incessantly, furnish
a variety of entertainment from one end of the year to the other.
If superstition implies fear, never was a word more misapplied
than it is to the mummery of the religion of Rome. The people are
so far from being impressed with awe and religious terror by this
sort of machinery, that it amuses their imaginations in the most
agreeable manner, and keeps them always in good humour. A Roman
catholic longs as impatiently for the festival of St. Suaire, or
St. Croix, or St. Veronique, as a schoolboy in England for the
representation of punch and the devil; and there is generally as
much laughing at one farce as at the other. Even when the descent
from the cross is acted, in the holy week, with all the
circumstances that ought naturally to inspire the gravest
sentiments, if you cast your eyes among the multitude that croud
the place, you will not discover one melancholy face: all is
prattling, tittering, or laughing; and ten to one but you
perceive a number of them employed in hissing the female who
personates the Virgin Mary. And here it may not be amiss to
observe, that the Roman catholics, not content with the infinite
number of saints who really existed, have not only personified
the cross, but made two female saints out of a piece of linen.
Veronique, or Veronica, is no other than a corruption of vera
icon, or vera effigies, said to be the exact representation of
our Saviour's face, impressed upon a piece of linen, with which
he wiped the sweat from his forehead in his way to the place of