Truly it is hard for you to hear the low knocking in the hubbub of your Vanity Fair. You are living in the midst of the most perfectly miscreant crowd that ever blasphemed creation. Not with the old snap-finger blasphemy of the wantonly profane, but the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: ‘Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods.’ Here’s one of my own boys getting up that lesson beside me for his next Oxford examination. For Adam Smith is accepted as the outcome of Practical Philosophy, at our universities; and their youth urged to come out high in competitive blasphemy. Not the old snap-finger sort, [111] I repeat, but that momentary sentiment, deliberately adopted for a national law. I must turn aside for a minute or two to explain this to you. The eighth circle of Dante’s Hell (compare Fors of December, 1872, p. 13,) is the circle of Fraud, divided into ten gulphs; in the seventh of these gulphs are the Thieves, by Fraud,—brilliantly now represented by the men who covet their neighbours’ goods and take them in any way they think safe, by high finance, sham companies, cheap goods, or any other of our popular modern ways. Now there is not in all the Inferno quite so studied a piece of descriptive work as Dante’s relation of the infection of one cursed soul of this crew by another. They change alternately into the forms of men and serpents, each biting the other into this change— “Ivy ne’er clasped A doddered oak, as round the other’s limbs The hideous monster intertwined his own; Then, as they both had been of burning wax, Each melted into other.” Read the story of the three transformations for yourself (Cantos xxiv., xxv.), and then note the main point of all, that the spirit of such theft is especially indicated by its intense and direct manner of blasphemy:— “I did not mark, Through all the gloomy circle of the abyss, Spirit that swelled so proudly ’gainst its God, Not him who headlong fell from Thebes.” The soul is Vanni Fucci’s, who rifled the sacristy of St. James of Pistoja, and charged Vanni della Nona with the sacrilege, whereupon the latter suffered death. For in those days, death was still the reward of sacrilege by the Law of State; whereas, while I write this Fors, I receive notice of the conjunction of the sacred and profane civic powers of London to de-consecrate, and restore to the definitely pronounced ‘unholy’ spaces of this world, the church of All-Hallows, wherein Milton was christened. A Bishop was there to read, as it were, the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or at least address it to the Devil instead of to God, to pray that over this portion of British Metropolitan territory His Kingdom might again come.