of the unforced and delicate voice, without extravagance of adjunct,
unhealthy lateness of hours, or appeal to degraded passions. Such
entertainment might be obtained at infinitely smaller cost, and yet
at a price which would secure honorable and permanent remuneration
to every performer; and I am mistaken in my notion of the best
actors, if they would not rather play at a house where people went
to hear and to feel, than weary themselves, even for four times the
pay, before an audience insulting in its listlessness and ignorant
in its applause.

[102] There are, unusually, two paintings of this subject, the first
representing the preparations for the scourging, the second its
close.

[103] This character has, I think, been traced in the various
writings of Mrs. Sherwood better than in any others; she has a
peculiar art of making it felt and of striking the deep tone of it
as from a passing-bell, contrasting it with the most cheerful,
lovely, and sincere conditions of Protestantism.

[104] See "Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII." (Dispatches of
the Venetian ambassador Giustinian, translated by Mr. Rawdon Brown,)
1854.

[105] Malva rotundifolia, Cichorium Intybus, Sisymbrium tenuifolium,
Chenopodium urbicum, Achillea Millefolium.

CHAPTER XX.

THE MOUNTAIN GLORY.

Sec. 1. I have dwelt, in the foregoing chapter, on the sadness of the hills
with the greater insistance that I feared my own excessive love for them
might lead me into too favorable interpretation of their influences over
the human heart; or, at least, that the reader might accuse me of fond
prejudice, in the conclusions to which, finally, I desire to lead him
concerning them. For, to myself, mountains are the beginning and the end
of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape
that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up; and though I can
look with happy admiration at the lowland flowers, and woods, and open
skies, the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of examining
detached flowers in a conservatory, or reading a pleasant book; and if
the scenery be resolutely level, insisting upon the declaration of its
own flatness in all the detail of it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or
Central Lombardy, it appears to me like a prison, and I cannot long
endure it. But the slightest rise and fall in the road,--a mossy bank at
the side