answered the Cameron’s Gathering at Waterloo; carried the Black Watch to Coomassie; and which has furnished Scotland with the materials of an immortal history. Still, rudeness is not independence, bluster is not strength, nor is coarseness courage. We have won the human understanding from the barbarism of the past; but we have won along with it the dignity, courtesy, and truth of civilized life. And the man who on the platform or in the press does violence to this ethical side of human nature discharges but an imperfect duty to the public, whatever the qualities of his understanding may be.’ This, we humbly think, is how men of science ought to talk when they quarrel—if they quarrel at all.” I hope much to profit by this lesson. I have not my “School for Scandal” by me—but I know where to find it the minute I get home; and I’ll do my best. “The man who,” etc., etc.;—yes, I think I can manage it. FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER XLIV. Rome, 6th June, 1874. The poor Campagna herdsman, whose seeking for St. Paul’s statue the Professor of Fine Art in the University of Oxford so disgracefully failed to assist him in, had been kneeling nearer the line of procession of the Corpus Domini than I;—in fact, quite among the rose-leaves which had been strewed for a carpet round the aisles of the Basilica. I grieve to say that I was shy of the rose-bestrewn path, myself; for the crowd waiting at the side of it had mixed up the rose-leaves with spittle so richly as to make quite a pink pomatum of them. And, indeed, the living temples of the Holy Ghost which in any manner bestir themselves here among the temples,—whether of Roman gods or Christian saints,—have merely and simply the two great operations upon them of filling their innermost adyta with dung, and making their pavements slippery with spittle: the Pope’s new tobacco manufactory under the Palatine,—an infinitely more important object now, in all views of Rome from the west, than either the Palatine or the Capitol,—greatly aiding and encouraging this especial form of lustration: while the still more ancient documents of Egyptian religion—the obelisks of the Piazza del Popolo, and of the portico of St. Peter’s—are entirely eclipsed by the obelisks of our English religion, lately elevated, in full view from the Pincian and the Montorio, with smoke coming out of the top of them. And farther, the entire eastern district of Rome, between the two Basilicas of the Lateran and St. Lorenzo, is now one mass of volcanic ruin;—a desert of dust and ashes, the lust of wealth exploding there, out of a crater deeper than Etna’s, and raging, as far as it can reach, in one frantic desolation of whatever is lovely, or holy, or memorable, in the central city of the world.