16th October. (St. Michael's.)--I haven't got my goose-pie made, after all; for my cook has been ill, and, unluckily, I've had other things as much requiring the patronage of St. Michael, to think of. You suppose, perhaps, (the English generally seem to have done so since the blessed Reformation,) that it is impious and Popish to think of St. Michael with reference to any more serious affair than the roasting of goose, or baking thereof; and yet I have had some amazed queries from my correspondents, touching the importance I seem to attach to my pie; and from others, questioning the economy of its construction. I don't suppose a more savoury, preservable, or nourishing dish could be made, with Michael's help, to drive the devil of hunger out of poor men's stomachs, on the occasions when Christians make a feast, and call to it the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind. But, putting the point of economy aside for the moment, I must now take leave to reply to my said correspondents, that the importance and reality of goose-pie, in the English imagination, as compared with the unimportance and unreality of the archangel Michael, his name, and his hierarchy, are quite as serious subjects of regret to me as to them; and that I believe them to be mainly traceable to the loss of the ideas, both of any 'arche,' beginning, or princedom of things, and of any holy or hieratic end of things; so that, except in eggs of vermin, embryos of apes, and other idols of genesis enthroned in Mr. Darwin's and Mr. Huxley's shrines, or in such extinction as may be proper for lice, or double-ends as may be discoverable in amphisbaenas, there is henceforward, for man, neither alpha nor omega,--neither, beginning nor end, neither nativity nor judgment; no Christmas Day, except for pudding; no Michaelmas, except for goose; no Dies Iræ, or day of final capital punishment, for anything; and that, therefore, in the classical words of Ocellus Lucanus, quoted by Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson, "Anarchon kai atelutaion to pan." There remains, however, among us, very strangely, some instinct of general difference between the abstractedly angelic, hieratic, or at least lord- and lady-like character;--and the diabolic, non-hieratic, or slave- and (reverse-of-lady-) like character. Instinct, which induces the 'London Journal,' and other such popular works of fiction, always to make their heroine, whether saint or poisoner, a 'Lady' something; and which probably affects your minds not a little in connection with the question of capital punishment; so that when I told you just now who Sir Philip's aunt was, perhaps you felt as if I had cheated you by the words of my first reference to her, and would say to yourselves, "Well, but Lady Jane Grey wasn't hanged!"