Again, the "respectability" of English Church religion would be as little tolerated as the _reclame_ of sheer Protestantism. There is absolutely nothing answering in the Italian temperament to that pride and pleasure in the respectability of church and chapel going which is so potent a factor in England. The sects which proselytise in Rome are the American Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans; many of the better educated preferring to all these the native Waldensian Church. One of the chief attractions of what I have called sheer Protestantism lies in its familiarity as compared with the stiff and terrible "respectability" of the English Church. But this is precisely where Italian Catholicism has itself never failed, and the Catholic in Italy is already accustomed to familiar and simple relations with priest monk and friar--to a complete democracy of sentiment. I was recently motioned to a vacant seat by a dignified French ecclesiastic who was giving out the usual notices from the altar after the Gospel of the mass; a Latin priest will notify the congregation by a gesture when he is about to preach and they can sit down; even an English Catholic priest I know of turns to the people before beginning the Christmas midnight mass to wish them and theirs a happy and blessed festival. These fraternal familiarities do not lack in the Nonconformist chapels, but they would most certainly be deemed out of place and not quite decorous in the English Church. Latin simplicity and human interest, the brotherhood of class, oppose themselves here to English self-consciousness, English inflexibility, the Puritan sense of propriety; and no one can have lived in Italy without seeing instances multiplied in all ranks of the clergy of that familiarity without loss of dignity to which we have not the key. Another thing little understood in England is that the Italian is not "priest-ridden"; he does not depend upon or run after the priest, and the attitude which the priest in Ireland and the minister in Scotland have been able to assume towards the people would never have been possible in Italy. The Roman, more especially, has never ceased to let his satire play upon popes and cardinals, and has known how to do so without scorning dogma and discipline. The _bigotte_ is not an Italian type; and is disliked and distrusted, in either sex, when met. The Roman peasant trudging into the city on Sunday morning halts at the big church of S. Paul in the Via Nazionale, enters, and walks up to the top. A verger at once points out to him his place in the house of God--for this is the American Episcopal church--and he returns to the door: he was uncertain about the church but he is quite certain now, this is not Latin Christianity. But if the Italian comes to London another surprise is in store for him; he goes to the Catholic church and finds he must take a ticket for his footing there--and, often, he goes no more, he has not sufficient threepences and sixpences; he does not