Jewels to the value of many thousand crowns have been offered at her shrine, and solemnly placed round the neck of her image, or suspended to her girdle." We dare not in candour charge the Romanists with being the only fabricators or receivers of such goods, remembering our own Saint Joanna, and Huntingdon's Autobiography. There are _aurea legenda_ in a certain class of our sectarian literature, presenting a large list of claimants of very high pretensions to saintship, only waiting for power and an established authority to be canonised. It is not surprising, as the world is--working often in the dark places of ignorance--if a few glossy threads of a coarser material, and deteriorating quality, be taken up by no wilful mistake, and be interwoven into the true golden tissue. Nevertheless the mantle may be still beautiful, and fit a Christian to wear and walk in not unbecomingly. There are worse things than religious superstition, whose badness is of degrees. In the minds of all nations and people there is a vacuum for the craving appetite of credulity to fill. The great interests of life lie in politics and religion. There are bigots in both: but we look upon a little superstition on the one point as far safer than upon the other, especially in modern times; whereas political bigotry, however often duped, is credulous still, and becomes hating and ferocious. We fear even the legends are losing their authority in the Roman States, whose history may yet have to be filled with far worse tales. A generous, though we deem it a mistaken feeling, has induced Mrs Jameson to make what we would almost venture to call the only mistake in her volumes: the following passage is certainly not in good taste, quite out of the intention of her book, and very unfortunately timed--"But Peter is certainly the democratical apostle _par excellence_, and his representative in our time seems to have awakened to a consciousness of this truth, and to have thrown himself--as St Peter would most certainly have done, were he living--on the side of the people and of freedom." A democratical successor to St Peter! He is, then, the first of that character. With him the "side of freedom" seems to have been the inside of his prison, and his "side of the people" a precipitate flight from contact with them in their liberty--and for his tiara the disguise of a valet. We more than pardon Mrs Jameson--we love the virtue that gives rise to her error; for it is peculiarly the nature of woman to be credulous, and to be deceived. We admire, and more than admire, women equally well, whether they are right or wrong in politics: these are the business of men, for they have to do with the sword, and are out of the tenderer impulses of woman. But we are amused when we find grave strong men in the same predicament of ill conjectures. We smile as we remember a certain dedication "To Pio Nono," which by its simple grandeur and magnificent beauty will live _splendide mendax_ to excuse its