high masses, their feasts, their processions, their pilgrimages,
confessions, images, tapers, robes, incense, benedictions, spectacles,
representations, and innumerable ceremonies, which revolve almost
incessantly, furnish a variety of entertainment from one end of the
year to the other. If superstition implies fear, never was a word more
misapplied than it is to the mummery of the religion of Rome. The
people are so far from being impressed with awe and religious terror by
this sort of machinery, that it amuses their imaginations in the most
agreeable manner, and keeps them always in good humour. A Roman
catholic longs as impatiently for the festival of St. Suaire, or St.
Croix, or St. Veronique, as a schoolboy in England for the
representation of punch and the devil; and there is generally as much
laughing at one farce as at the other. Even when the descent from the
cross is acted, in the holy week, with all the circumstances that ought
naturally to inspire the gravest sentiments, if you cast your eyes
among the multitude that croud the place, you will not discover one
melancholy face: all is prattling, tittering, or laughing; and ten to
one but you perceive a number of them employed in hissing the female
who personates the Virgin Mary. And here it may not be amiss to
observe, that the Roman catholics, not content with the infinite number
of saints who really existed, have not only personified the cross, but
made two female saints out of a piece of linen. Veronique, or Veronica,
is no other than a corruption of vera icon, or vera effigies, said to
be the exact representation of our Saviour's face, impressed upon a
piece of linen, with which he wiped the sweat from his forehead in his
way to the place of crucifixion. The same is worshipped under the name
of St. Suaire, from the Latin word sudarium. This same handkerchief is
said to have had three folds, on every one of which was the impression:
one of these remains at Jerusalem, a second was brought to Rome, and a
third was conveyed to Spain. Baronius says, there is a very antient
history of the sancta facies in the Vatican. Tillemont, however, looks
upon the whole as a fable. Some suppose Veronica to be the same with
St. Haemorrhoissa, the patroness of those who are afflicted with the
piles, who make their joint invocations to her and St. Fiacre, the son
of a Scotch king, who lived and died a hermit in France. The troops of
Henry V. of England are said to have pillage