ery in this clean, cheerful
chapel we look down upon the group below. The sight is an unmitigatedly
sad one; we fail to see a single pleasant face. The chapel, considering
who are the audience, is almost light and cheerful. It is painful to
turn from its white walls and rafters to the crowd beneath and realize
how much darker and more cheerless is the human face when it is void of
intelligence. In this chapel you do not see the worse cases, they are
properly concealed from the spectator's eye; it is enough to know that
they are equally wisely and carefully tended with those before you. The
women are far more troublesome than the men. All are hideously ugly,
such as Fuseli might dream of after a supper of pork-chops, such as,
perhaps, that wonderful painter at Brussels, whose pictures form the
chief modern attraction of the place, could have painted in that queer
little imitation Roman ruin in which he lived and died, but such as no
living artist, at any rate in England, could portray. You feel inclined
to exclaim with Banquo--

"What are these,
So withered and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants of earth,
And yet are on't?"

Some sit as living corpses, others with scowling eye, flesh-and-blood
pictures of despair. Others there be who have driven themselves mad with
their bad tempers and unruly tongues. You can read all that in many a
repulsive and reddened face. This one had led a gay life; what a
termination for a career of pleasure! That one has become what she is by
drinking; this one by the grand passion which underlies all human life,
past or present, all philosophy, subjective or objective, all religion,
true or false. Amongst the men you do not see so many thoroughly dead
and vacant faces; you will also see among them more diversity of action
and a greater assertion of individuality. Some look angry, some silly,
but few have that God-forsaken appearance sad to behold anywhere, but
especially on the face of what might have been possibly under happier
circumstances a tender, loving woman. But the tones of the organ
indicate that the service is commencing. Men and women are now hushed
and still; in spite of an occasional friendly word with a neighbour, whom
very probably they pity as "As mad as a March hare," males and females
come and go quietly and comfortably. Most of them have Prayer-books, and
make a proper use of them; they join in the response