He is much impressed by the religious architecture of the Christians. Before their sacred edifices, he feels his soul lifted into a sublime tranquillity, as in the presence of the grandest objects in Nature. He is much moved at recognizing in the rich stone carving a resemblance to the ornamental cane-work of African houses. This reminds him of what he once heard said by a learned Arab,--that Africa was the first home of the arts, as of man himself, and that they had gone forth from their too indulgent mother to be perfected in sterner regions, where invention is quickened by necessity. He cannot but bow before the wisdom of the superintending Providence which has caused the rigors of climate and the poverty of soil so to act on the mind of man, that, where Nature is less great and exuberant, his own works are the more transcendent, so that his spiritual part may never lack the food it draws from the view of sublime and genial objects. He admires less the arrangements of private dwellings. He finds that in England, as in Africa, the habitations of families in easy circumstances consist of several houses; but, instead of being all placed on the ground at a little distance from each other, the square in which they stand surrounded by a pretty palisade, as is the case in Africa, they are here piled one upon another, sometimes to a considerable height, so that it is necessary to mount by long flights of uneasy steps; and then, in the cities, houses occupied by different families often adjoin each other, having a partition-wall in common, and their doors opening on a common way, so that it would seem the people living in them can have no proper notion of home or of domestic retirement. He finds that the houses of the common people in the country are not of more durable material than African houses. Those of the great are very commonly of stone, and, unless ruined by violence, are capable of serving for centuries. The African does not think this an advantage, as in the case of the temples; for these damp stone houses, so long used as human abodes, become unwholesome; and what is even worse, when evil deeds have been committed in them,--and this is too often the case with the houses of the powerful,--the contagion of guilt hangs round the walls, and the same crime is repeated in after-generations.