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    gatherings , at Jerusalem , from all the country , at Pascal and Pentecost , would . .. be dead forms , and want the vitality of the antique enthusiasm . And so is the Catholic religion outworn in Europe . Its spell is broken ; much more by commerce , than by

    Protestantism . Hut we are hastening towards another stage . It is only for a time that the artisan is less poetical than the savage . With the progress of intelligence , he must become much more so . He already begins to feel the beauty of a statue or a painting which his great-great-grandfather would have worshipped , and which his grandfather would have kicked into a bonfire , in honour , as

    the squire told him , of the house of Hanover ; shouting , ' Down with the Pope and the Pretender ; liberty and property for ever . ' As soon as we get beyond the time—and we are getting beyond it—when the rich man gives enormous sums for a work of art , simply because thereby it becomes his property ; and the poor

    man takes up a paving-stone to have a shy at it , because it is not his property ; we shall have advanced a step towards a capacity for national sociality . We have not forgotten the ' picture-fuddles * of the mechanics . Moreover , they have no bad notions of processions . They have the taste , which also thrives in America , for this species of exhibition . It is true that ,, in the best we have

    witnessed , indeed the only good ones , there was a deeper and ulterior purpose . They were meant to produce the perception , not of poetry , but of power . And that made the poetry . Who that witnessed will ever forget the procession of the trades' unions to petition for the remission of the sentence on the Dorchester

    convicts ? There was the true feeling in that procession . There were no mere ornaments ; no flaring and flaunting banners ; the simplest insignia just served to mark and marshal the divisions . There were no petty arrangements io enhance the show and the effect . As H . M . Williams said of the Champ de Mars , ' The people , sure , the people were the sight / Their banner was the

    huge roll of their petition . Their only music was the ceaseless tramp , tramp , with which their close ranks came on , * regular as rolling water / one line of living wave after another , like the billows when a strong steady breeze is blowing shoreward ; and in every face that one fixed purpose which showed that the stem pleasure of duty was the animating spirit of this multitudinous , but undivided uody . The loungers of the club-houses , who turned out to laugh , looked on with a sobered demeanour , which showed

    there was a power in the passing scene to reach even the atom of soul which they possessed . The portion of the people that could so marshal themselves for petitioning , when community of interest and feeling shall have identified them with the rest of the nation , will be well prepared to aid in real national celebrations . < Now universal England getteth drunk will not be the record of those festivals . The second desideratum to which we referred ia that of thd

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    752 National Anniversaries .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1834, page 752, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2639/page/4/