With her pardon, pictures are much to this class of young people. The woodcuts of halfpenny novels representing scenes of fashionable life,—those representing men murdering their wives, in the ‘Police News,’—and, finally, those which are to be bought only in the back-shop,—have enormous educational influence on the young British public: which its clergymen, alike ignorant of human nature and human art, think to counteract—by decorating their own churches, forsooth,—and by coloured prints of the story of Joseph; while the lower tribes of them—Moodys and Sankeys—think to turn modern musical taste to account by fitting negro melodies to hymns. And yet, my correspondent may be thankful that some remnant of delight is still taken in dance-music. It is the last protest of the human spirit, in the poor fallen creatures, against the reign of the absolute Devil, Pandemonium with Mammon on the throne, instead of Lucifer,—the Son of the Earth, Lord of Hell, instead of the Son of the Morning. Let her stand in the midst of the main railroad station at Birmingham; and think—what music, or dancing, or other entertainment fit for prodigal sons, could be possible in that pious and little prodigal locality. [55] Let her read the account of our modern pastoral music, at page 15 of my fifth letter,—of modern Venetian “Barcarolle,” page 14 of Letter XIX. and 12 of Letter XX.,—and of our modern Campanile, and Muezzin call to prayer, at page 262 of this Fors. “Work is prayer”—thinks your Wakefield Mahometan;—his vociferous minaret, in the name, and by the name, of the Devil, shall summon English votaries to such worship for five miles round; that is to say, over one hundred square miles of English land, the Pandemoniacal voice of the Archangel-trumpet thus arouses men out of their sleep; and Wakefield becomes Wakeful-field, over that blessed space of acre-age. Yes; my correspondent may be thankful that still some feeble lust for dancing on the green,—still some dim acknowledgment, by besotted and stupefied brains, of the laws of tune and time known to their fathers and mothers—remains possible to the poor wretches discharged by the excursion trains for a gasp of breath, and a gleam of light, amidst what is left to them, and us, of English earth and heaven. Waltzing, drunk, in the country roads by our villages; yet innocently drunk, and sleepy at sunset; not like their born masters and teachers, dancing, wilfully, the cancan of hell, with harlots, at seven in the morning. [56]