“There is an unhappy wretch of a clergyman I read of in the papers—spending his life industriously in showing the meanness of Alexander Pope—and how Alexander Pope cringed, and lied. He cringed—yes—to his friends;—nor is any man good for much who will not play spaniel to his friend, or his mistress, on occasion;—to how many more than their friends do average clergymen cringe? I have had a Bishop go round the Royal Academy even with me,—pretending he liked painting, when he was eternally incapable of knowing anything whatever about it. Pope lied also—alas, yes, for his vanity’s sake. Very woful. But he did not pass the whole of his life in trying to anticipate, or appropriate, or efface, other people’s discoveries, as your modern men of science do so often; and for lying—any average partizan of religious dogma tells more lies in his pulpit in defence of what in his heart he knows to be indefensible, on any given Sunday, than Pope did in his whole life. Nay, how often is your clergyman himself nothing but a lie rampant—in the true old sense of the word,—creeping up into his pulpit pretending that he is there as a messenger of God, when he really took the place that he might be able to marry a pretty girl, and live like a ‘gentleman’ as he thinks. Alas! how infinitely more of a gentleman if he would but hold his foolish tongue, and get a living honestly—by street-sweeping, or any other useful occupation—instead of sweeping the dust of his own thoughts into people’s eyes—as this ‘biographer.’” I shall have a good deal to say about human madness, in the course of Fors; the following letter, concerning the much less mischievous rabies of Dogs, is, however, also valuable. Note especially its closing paragraph. I omit a sentence here and there which seems to me unnecessary. “On the 7th June last there appeared in the ‘Macclesfield Guardian’ newspaper a letter on Rabies and the muzzling and confining of Dogs, signed ‘Beth-Gêlert.’ That communication contained several facts and opinions relating to the disease; the possible causes of the same; and the uselessness and cruelty of muzzling and confinement as a preventive to it. The first-named unnatural practice has been condemned (as was there shown) by no less authority than the leading medical journal of England,—which has termed muzzling ‘a great practical mistake, and one which cannot fail to have an injurious effect both upon the health and temper of dogs; for, although rabies is a dreadful thing, dogs ought not, any more than men, to be constantly treated as creatures likely to go mad.’