to,
By damning those she has no mind to;"

and that because England is a money-making country, and money-making
is an effeminate pursuit, therefore all sedentary and spoony sins,
like covetousness, slander, bigotry, and self-conceit, are to be
cockered and plastered over, while the more masculine vices, and no-
vices also, are mercilessly hunted down by your cold-blooded, soft-
handed religionists.

'This is a more quiet letter than usual from me, my dear coz, for
many of your reproofs cut me home: they angered me at the time; but
I deserve them. I am miserable, self-disgusted, self-helpless,
craving for freedom, and yet crying aloud for some one to come and
guide me, and teach me; and WHO IS THERE IN THESE DAYS WHO COULD
TEACH A FAST MAN, EVEN IF HE WOULD TRY? Be sure, that as long as
you and yours make piety a synonym for unmanliness, you will never
convert either me or any other good sportsman.

'By the bye, my dear fellow, was I asleep or awake when I seemed to
read in the postscript of your last letter, something about "being
driven to Rome after all"? . . . Why thither, of all places in
heaven or earth? You know, I have no party interest in the
question. All creeds are very much alike to me just now. But allow
me to ask, in a spirit of the most tolerant curiosity, what possible
celestial bait, either of the useful or the agreeable kind, can the
present excellent Pope, or his adherents, hold out to you in
compensation for the solid earthly pudding which you would have to
desert? . . . I daresay, though, that I shall not comprehend your
answer when it comes. I am, you know, utterly deficient in that
sixth sense of the angelic or supralunar beautiful, which fills your
soul with ecstasy. You, I know, expect and long to become an angel
after death: I am under the strange hallucination that my body is
part of me, and in spite of old Plotinus, look with horror at a
disembodiment till the giving of that new body, the great perfection
of which, in your eyes, and those of every one else, seems to be,
that it will be less, and not more of a body, than our present one.
. . . Is this hope, to me at once inconceivable and contradictory,
palpable and valuable enough to you to send you to that Italian
Avernus, to get it made a little more certain? If so, I despair of
your making your meaning intelligible to a poor fellow wallowing,
like me, in the Hylic Borboros--or whatever els