Letter V.

Rough cloak of hair, it is, still at Assisi; concerning which, and the
general use of camels' hair, or sackcloth, or briars and thorns, in the
Middle Ages, together with seal-skins (not badgers'), and rams' skins
dyed gules, by the Jews, and the Crusaders, as compared with the use of
the two furs, Ermine and Vair, and their final result in the operations
of the Hudson's Bay Company, much casual notice will be found in my
former work. And now, this is the sum of it all, so far as I can
shortly write it.

There is no possibility of explaining the system of life in this world,
on any principle of _conqueringly_ Divine benevolence. That piece of
bold impiety, if it be so, I have always asserted in my well-considered
books,--I considering it, on the contrary, the only really pious thing
to say, namely, that the world is under a curse, which we may, if we
will, gradually remove, by doing as we are bid, and believing what we
are told; and when we are told, for instance, in the best book we have
about our own old history, that "unto Adam also, and to his wife, did
the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them," we are to accept
it as the best thing to be done under the circumstances, and to wear,
if we can get them, wolf skin, or cow skin, or beaver's, or ermine's;
but not therefore to confuse God with the Hudson's Bay Company, nor to
hunt foxes for their brushes instead of their skins, or think the poor
little black tails of a Siberian weasel on a judge's shoulders may
constitute him therefore a Minos in matters of retributive justice, or
an AEacus in distributive, who can at once determine how many millions a
Railroad Company are to make the public pay for not granting them their
exclusive business by telegraph.

133. And every hour of my life, since that paragraph of 'Modern
Painters' was written, has increased, I disdain to say my _feeling_,
but say, with fearless decision, my _knowledge_, of the bitterness of
the curse, which the habits of hunting and 'la chasse' have brought
upon the so-called upper classes of England and France; until, from
knights and gentlemen, they have sunk into jockeys, speculators,
usurers, butchers by battue; and, the English especially, now, as a
political body, into what I have called them in the opening chapter of
'The Bible of Amiens,'--"the scurviest louts that ever fouled God's
earth with their carcasses."

The language appears to be violent. It is simply brief, and