When we were at Shrewsbury the other day, coming up the Abbey Foregate, we met a funeral and debated whether or not to take our hats off. We always do in Italy, that is to say in the country and in villages and small towns, but we have been told that it is not the custom to do so in large towns and in cities, which raises a question as to the exact figure that should be reached by the population of a place before one need not take off one’s hat to a funeral in one of its streets. At Shrewsbury seeing no one doing it we thought it might look singular and kept ours on. My friend Mr. Phillips, the tailor, was in one carriage, I did not see him, but he saw me and afterwards told me he had pointed me out to a clergyman who was in the carriage with him. “Oh,” said the clergyman, “then that’s the man who says England owes all her greatness to intoxication.” This is rather a free translation of what I did say; but it only shows how impossible it is to please those who do not wish to be pleased. Tennyson may talk about the slow sad hours that bring us all things ill and all good things from evil, because this is vague and indefinite; but I may not say that, in spite of the terrible consequences of drunkenness, man’s intellectual development would not have reached its present stage without the stimulus of alcohol—which I believe to be both perfectly true and pretty generally admitted—because this is definite. I do not think I said more than this and am sure that no one can detest drunkenness more than I do. {343} It seems to me it will be wiser in me not to try to make headway at Shrewsbury. Hell-Fire If Vesuvius does not frighten those who live under it, is it likely that Hell-fire should frighten any reasonable person? I met a traveller who had returned from Hades where he had conversed with Tantalus and with others of the shades. They all agreed that for the first six, or perhaps twelve, months they disliked their punishment very much; but after that, it was like shelling peas on a hot afternoon in July. They began by discovering (no doubt long after the fact had been apparent enough to every one else) that they had not been noticing what they were doing so much as usual, and that they had been even thinking of something else. From this moment, the automatic stage of action having set in, the progress towards always thinking of something else was rapid and they soon forgot that they were undergoing any punishment.