is your national love of Art.

35. IV.--You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and
sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists made
stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses of the
cathedrals of the earth. Your _one_ conception of pleasure is to drive
in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars.[12]
You have put a railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. You have
tunneled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel; you have destroyed the
Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in
England that you have not filled with bellowing fire; there is no
particle left of English land which you have not trampled coal ashes
into[13]--nor any foreign city in which the spread of your presence is
not marked among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a consuming
white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves,
which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as
soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, and
slide down again with "shrieks of delight." When you are past
shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with,
you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush
home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with
convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two
sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep
inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of
Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and the Swiss
vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian thanks for the gift of
the vine, by assembling in knots in the "towers of the vineyards," and
slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till evening. It
is pitiful to have dim conceptions of duty; more pitiful, it seems to
me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.

36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need of words of
mine for proof of this. I will merely print one of the newspaper
paragraphs which I am in the habit of cutting out and throwing into my
store-drawer; here is one from a _Daily Telegraph_ of an early date
this year (1867) (date which, though by me carelessly left unmarked, is
easily discoverable; for on the back of the slip, there is the
announcement that "yesterday the seventh of the special services of
this year was performed by the Bis