h was noways abated by the spectacle over the way. The whole
thing was acted exactly as I had seen it before; but to me it was a
novelty to hear Punch, and all the other interlocutors in the piece,
discourse in the language in which Dante had sung, and in which I had
heard, just before leaving Scotland, Gavazzi declaim. In all lands Punch
is an astute scoundrel; but, strange to say, in all lands the popular
feeling is on his side. His imperturbable coolness and truculent villany
procured him plaudits among the Milanese, as I had seen them do
elsewhere. Courage and self-possession are valuable qualities, and for
their sake we sometimes forgive bad men and bad causes; whereas, from
nothing do we more instinctively recoil than from hypocrisy. On this
principle it is, perhaps, that we have a sort of liking for Punch,
incorrigible scoundrel as he is; and that great criminals, who rob and
murder at the head of armies, we deify, while little ones we hang.

I had now completed my tour of the Cathedral, and could not help
reflecting on the miscellaneous, and apparently incongruous, character
of the spectacles grouped together in the square. In the middle was the
great temple, in which priests, in stole and mitre, celebrated the high
mysteries of their Church. In one of the angles were rows of mounted
cannon, and a forest of bayonets. In another was seen the whole process
of refining souls in purgatory. Strange, that if men here are shut up in
prisons and hulks amid desperadoes, they come out more finished villains
than they entered; whereas hereafter, if men are shut up with even worse
characters, amid blazing fires, glowing gridirons, and cauldrons of
boiling lead, they come out perfected in virtue. They pass at once from
the society of fiends, where they have been whipped, roasted, and I know
not what, to the society of angels. This is a strange schooling to give
dignity to the character and conscious purity to the mind. And yet Rome
subjects all her sons to this discipline for a longer or shorter period.
Much do we marvel, that the same process which unfits men for
associating with respectable people here should be the very thing to
prepare them for good society hereafter. The other side of the square
Punch had all to himself; and Punch, I saw, was the favourite. The
inhabitants of Milan kept as respectable a distance from the painted
fiends as if they had been veritable Satans, ready to clutch the
incautious passer-by, and ca