human
Arbroath, _Sunday, Nov. 2, 1873_.--What a comfort it is for once to feel utterly unknown; for even my luggage has only a monogram, and here at the White Hart I am No. 15, and a commercial gent to all appearance: really, it is quite a relief to be some one else than Martin Tupper.
gpt
Read J.S. Mill's autobiography; poor wretch! from his cradle brought up as an atheist by a renegade father, he can have been hardly more responsible for his no faith than a born idiot. However, in these infidel last times, and with our very broad-church and no-church teachings, a man has only to be utterly godless (so he be moral) to make himself a name for pure reason. I'd sooner be the most unenlightened Christian than such a false philosopher. Let a Goldsmith say of me, 'No very great wit, he believed in a God,' for I refuse to deny one, like the Psalmist's fool.
human
I throw myself so into my readings, that I almost forget my audience, till their cheering, as it were, wakes me up,--and I feel every word I say: if I didn't, that word would fall dead. There is a magnetism in earnestness,--an electric power; I am in a way full of it when reciting, and I am aware of it flowing through the mass of my audience.
gpt
It was a touching thing to me to hear the aged Mr. B---- conduct his family worship, singing like an old Covenanter the harmonious Puritan dirgy hymn, reading the Bible most devoutly, and praying (as only Presbyterians can pray) from the heart and not from a formal liturgy, earnestly and eloquently; he prayed also for me and mine, and I thank God and him for it.
human
My host at Ayr drove me in his waggonette to see the mausoleum at Hamilton Palace, with its wonderful bronze doors after Ghiberti, and its inlaid marble floor, much of which is of real verd antique in small pieces. Then we went down among the dead men, and inspected the coffins of nearly all the Dukes of Hamilton. It is an outrage to have expended so much (£100,000) on this senseless mausoleum, and to have left close by and within sight of the great Grecian palace those filthy crowded streets of poverty and disease--the wretched town of Hamilton--as a contrast to profuse extravagance. The last Duke, the very Lord Douglas who was in the same class with me at Christ Church, and is supposed to have personated me in Tom Quad, has a very graceful temple of Vesta all to himself, with his bust in the middle: his father lies, of all heathenish absurdities, in a real antique Egyptian sarcophagus, into which it is said he was fitted by internal scoopings, the Duke being taller than its former tenant, the Pharaoh. All this done, we drove through some rugged parts of the High Park, to see magnificent oaks, much like some at Albury, in hopes of coming upon the famous wild cattle, grey, with black feet, ears, tail, and nose, and stated to be untameable. To our great satisfaction we did see a herd of thirty-four feeding quietly enough; had we been walking instead of driving we might have fared poorly as hunted ones: though I confess I saw at first no fierceness in the lot of them; but when the herd sighted us, and began ominously to commence encircling our gig, under the guidance of a terrible bull, we turned and fled, as the discreeter part of wisdom; Captain Hamilton, my host, telling me that if they charged us we must jump out and swarm up a tree! I was glad to be out of such a fearful escapade as that.
gpt
As to diversities in the Scotch Church, after seeing many clerical specimens of each kind, I judge that (generally) the Established Scotch gives itself the superior airs of the Established English; the Frees are the most intellectual; the U.P.s most pious; the Scottish Episcopal getting excessively high; and some other varieties growing far too broad and pantheistic. I don't wonder to hear Papists say that Protestantism is breaking up; no two parsons are agreed on all points, some on none.