I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensation must be got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage. And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain. The London correspondent of the Brighton Daily News writes:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.” For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money. “But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”