, and never miss the bull's-eye.

"It is a horribly ungentlemanly thing to say here, though I _do_ say it
without the least reserve--but my sympathy is all with the radicals. I
don't know any subject on which this indomitable people have so good a
right to a strong feeling as Catholicity--if not as a religion, clearly
as a means of social degradation. They know what it is. They live close
to it. They have Italy beyond their mountains. They can compare the
effect of the two systems at any time in their own valleys; and their
dread of it, and their horror of the introduction of Catholic priests
and emissaries into their towns, seems to me the most rational feeling
in the world. Apart from this, you have no conception of the
preposterous, insolent little aristocracy of Geneva: the most ridiculous
caricature the fancy can suggest of what we know in England. I was
talking to two famous gentlemen (very intelligent men) of that place,
not long ago, who came over to invite me to a sort of reception
there--which I declined. Really their talk about 'the people' and 'the
masses,' and the necessity they would shortly be under of shooting a few
of them as an example for the rest, was a kind of monstrosity one might
have heard at Genoa. The audacious insolence and contempt of the people
by their newspapers, too, is quite absurd. It is difficult to believe
that men of sense can be such donkeys politically. It was precisely such
a state of things that brought about the change here. There was a most
respectful petition presented on the Jesuit question, signed by its tens
of thousands of small farmers; the regular peasants of the canton, all
splendidly taught in public schools, and intellectually as well as
physically a most remarkable body of labouring men. This document is
treated by the gentlemanly party with the most sublime contempt, and the
signatures are said to be the signatures of 'the rabble.' Upon which,
each man of the rabble shoulders his rifle, and walks in upon a given
day agreed upon among them to Lausanne; and the gentlemanly party walk
out without striking a blow."

Such traces of the "revolution" as he found upon his present visit to
Geneva he described in writing to me from the hotel de l'Ecu on the 20th
of October. "You never would suppose from the look of this town that
there had been anything revolutionary going on. Over the window of my
old bedroom there is a great hole made by a cannon-ball in the
house-front; a