Let me, however, be acquitted of presumption if I say that I cannot
agree with Mr. Malone, that our ancestors did not perceive the ludicrous
in these things, or that they paid no separate attention to the serious
and comic parts. Indeed his own statement contradicts it. For what
purpose should the Vice leap upon the Devil's back and belabour him, but
to produce this separate attention? The people laughed heartily, no
doubt. Nor can I conceive any meaning attached to the words "separate
attention," that is not fully answered by one part of an exhibition
exciting seriousness or pity, and the other raising mirth and loud
laughter. That they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it
is the very essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all
its essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily and the south
of Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI.--(nay, more
so; for a Wicliffe had then not appeared only, but scattered the good
seed widely,) it is an essential part, I say, of that system to draw the
mind wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet discriminations, and
to habituate the conscience to pronounce sentence in every case
according to the established verdicts of the church and the casuists. I
have looked through volume after volume of the most approved
casuists,--and still I find disquisitions whether this or that act is
right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes
reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which
none but a monk could harden himself, who has been stripped of all the
tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by
the unsubdued hauntings of our meaner nature, even as dogs are said to
get the 'hydrophobia' from excessive thirst. I fully believe that our
ancestors laughed as heartily, as their posterity do at Grimaldi;--and
not having been told that they would be punished for laughing, they
thought it very innocent;--and if their priests had left out murder in
the catalogue of their prohibitions (as indeed they did under certain