When you speak of the popular effect and enthusiasm produced by the ceremonies of the Catholic church, it is presently objected that all this faith and zeal is excited by mummery and superstition. I am ready to allow that; and when I find that truth and reason have the same homage and reverence paid to them as absurdity and falsehood, I shall think all the advantages are clearly on the side of the former. The processes of reason do not commonly afford the elements of passion as their result; and the object of strong and even lofty feeling seems to appeal rather to the grossness and incongruity of the senses and imagination, than to the clear and dry deductions of the understanding. Man has been truly defined a _religious animal_; but his faith and heavenward aspirations cease if you reduce him to a mere mathematical machine. The glory and the power of the true religion are in its enlisting the affections of man along with the understanding. LVIII We are imposed upon by the affectation of grace and gentility only till we see the reality; and then we laugh at the counterfeit, and are surprised that we did not see through it before. LIX English women, even of the highest rank, look like _dowdies_ in Paris; or exactly as countrywomen do in London. It is a _rule-of-three_ proportion. A French milliner or servant maid laughs (not without reason) at an English Duchess. The more our fair country women dress _à la Française_, the more unlucky they seem; and the more foreign graces they give themselves, the more awkward they grow. They want the _tournure_ Françoise. Oh! how we have ‘melted, thawed, and dissolved into a dew,’ to see a bustling, red-faced, bare-necked English Duchess, or banker’s wife, come into a box at the French theatre, bedizened and bedaubed! My Lady-mayoress or the Right Honourable the Countess Dowager of ——, before she ventures on the word _vulgar_, or scorns her untitled and untutored neighbours as beneath her notice, should go to see _les Angloises pour rire_! _That_ is the looking-glass for upstart wealth and inflated aristocracy. LX The advantage of our nobility over the plebeian classes is said to be in the blood and in the breed—the Norman breed, we suppose—the high noses and arched eyebrows date from the Conquest. We plead guilty to the insinuation conveyed in the expression—‘the coronet face’—and bow with some sort of pride to the pride of birth. But this hypothesis is hardly compatible with the evident improvement in the present generation of noblemen and gentlemen by the intermarriages with rich heiresses, or the beautiful Pamelas of an humbler stock. _Crossing the breed_ has done much good; for the actual race of Bond-street loungers would make a very respectable regiment of grenadiers; and the satire on Beau Didapper, in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, has lost its force. LXI