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Untitled Article
once nearly swept her from her foothold . But look how many beautiful women there are in the streets to-day . It seems to me that handsome women have a peculiar temperament , which is acted on by a peculiar state of the atmosphere , and induces them to go out
simultaneously . There are some days , also , when neither love nor money , nor any other inducement which ordinarily acts upon humanity , couid find a handsome woman in the streets . There must be something in this perfectly natural , * if philosophy could find it out . ' What huge church is that , father ?
St . Paul has it in his especial keeping , boy . Is it not a monstrous mass ? It is old , and a cathedral , and therefore all the world says it is very magnificent ; but it would speak no poetry to me , were it not for its size and peculiar colouring of grey , white , and black , which nothing but a . London atmosphere can bestow . But this is not the time to see it . We could not have a finer day .
It is not a day we need , but a night , or rather a morning , and more especially now there are no watchmen to vex the ears—nothing but a dark blue police , silent and slinking into corners , like the uncooked lobsters' to which they have been compared . When every shop is closed , and the streets are in silence and solitude , when the unearthly looking gas burns brightly as the flames to which Christians have too often condemned each other , and the bright moon is sailing
—an uncommon thing- in England—over the clear blue vault , and yonder huge clock strikes the solitary hour of one , then is the time to fold the arms and survey that enormous pile . The city is then not of the living but of the de * ad , and the statue of Anne Stuart seems to glare out of the last century , and call to mind things long passed away . Her egg-looking face with the lobster eyes and vile nose projected on it , in unsightly relief , seems trying at indignation , but
cannot get beyond the aspect of a scold . Strange is it that five generations of kings should have filled her place in turn , after such a sample . But it would almost seem as though our ancestors had been prophetic , when they erected the i Royal Exchange . ' The niches of the line of kings are nearly filled . Can we not go into the church , father ? Yes , boy , by the payment of sundry twopences each .
Then what do the people do who have no twopences ? Go without , boy . We are , as the Frenchman said , a commercial nation , and turn every thing to profit . ' Nay , so absurdly bigoted are we on the subject , that we would rather commit injustice , even upon ourselves , than suffer any thing to be given for nothing . That church , for example , was built with the people ' s money , and is kept in repair by the people ' s money ; huge revenues are assigned to the
bloated priests who have it in charge , and notwithstanding they charge fees to such of the people as wish to look at its interior—more marvellous still , the people unrepiningly pay them . But the matter is working its own cure , by the aid of the greatest champion of religious reform which has appeared in modern times . Who is that , father ? A thing called tithes , boy . When population is unduly thickened ,
Untitled Article
688 Juvenile Lessons .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 688, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/28/
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