Of the frantic hatred of all religion developed in the French republican mind, the sentences I have quoted are interesting examples. I have not time to speak of them in this letter, but they struck me sharply as I corrected the press to-day; for I had been standing most part of the morning by St. Paul’s grave, thinking over his work in the world. A bewildered peasant, from some green dingle of Campagna, who had seen me kneel when the Host passed, and took me therefore to be a human creature and a friend, asked me ‘where St. Paul was’? ‘There, underneath,’ I answered. ‘There?’ he repeated, doubtfully,—as dissatisfied. ‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘his body at least;—his head is at the Lateran.’ ‘Il suo corpo,’ again he repeated, still as in discontent. Then, after a pause, ‘E la sua statua?’ Such a wicked thing to ask for that! wasn’t it, my Evangelical friends? You would so much rather have had him ask for Hudson’s! NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE. I have had by me, some time, three eager little fragments from one of Mr. Sillar’s letters:—too eager, always, in thinking this one sin of receiving interest on money means every other. I know many excellent people, happily, whose natures have not been spoiled by it: the more as it has been done absolutely without knowledge of being wrong. I did not find out the wrong of it myself, till Mr. Sillar showed me the way to judge of it. The passage which I have italicized, from Mr. Lecky, is a very precious statement of his sagacious creed. The chief jest of it is his having imagined himself to be of Aristotle’s ‘species’! “To get profit without responsibility has been a fond scheme as impossible of honest attainment as the philosopher’s stone or perpetual motion. Visionaries have imagined such things to exist, but it has been reserved for this mammon-worshipping generation to find it in that arrangement by which a man, without labour, can secure a permanent income with perfect security, and without diminution of the capital. “A view of it is evidently taken by Lord Bacon when he says that usury bringeth the treasure of a realm into few hands; for the usurer trading on a certainty, and other men on uncertainties, at the end of the game all the money will be in the box. “We have had now an opportunity of practically testing this theory; not more than seventeen years have elapsed since all restraint was removed from the growth of what Lord Coke calls this ‘pestilent weed’ and we see Bacon’s words verified, the rich becoming richer, and the poor poorer, is the cry throughout the whole civilized world. Rollin in his Ancient History, speaking of the Roman Empire, tells us that it has been the ruin of every state where it was tolerated. It is in a fair way to ruin this of ours, and ruin it it will, unless England’s sons calmly and candidly investigate the question for themselves, and resolutely act upon the conclusions to which the investigation must lead them.