parents omitted to stipulate also that she was not to be lent any books on Romanism, therefore she had a complete course administered to her of the most enticing Popish works, which produced their almost inevitable effect in teaching the young pupil to prefer a religion of fancy and fiction to one of sober and truthful reality. She was lately, of course, "received" into the Romish Church.

The author read a letter, some time since, from an English nun in a foreign convent, mentioning that the Virgin Mary is often seen in their garden, and that one of the nuns had obtained a vision of her there very recentlyperhaps, sowing the seeds of Popery! Such is the result of solitude, sleeplessness, fasting, and a very excited imagination!

A relation of the author's printed for private circulation once, and sent her a copy of the following curious narrative:-He was travelling on the continent, about fifteen years ago, when, seeing a funeral procession enter a church, he followed to witness the solemn rite. On an open bier lay the corpse of a lovely young girl, and beside it stood her sister, whose beauty and grief so moved the young Scotchman, that he gazed at her earnestly and

mournfully, till quite on a sudden she looked up, and sprung forward, with an exclamation of devout reverence, declaring, in an exstasy of rapture, that she had prayed all the morning to her patron, St. Sebastian, for comfort, and that here he had come in person to console her. The astonished traveller, a shy, reserved man, unaccustomed to Popish visions, felt greatly startled on finding himself thus the subject of one; but became afterwards so interested in the adventure, that he had his own picture done, by an eminent Italian master, in the character of St. Sebastian, which may still be seen in his collection, stuck full of arrows.

In the present day, many children are allowed no imaginative reading, except on religion. The universal craving which they all have for something supernatural, used to be humoured by allowing their young fancies to expand over the harmless wonders of "Mother Bunch;" but now their books of relaxation or amusement consist of conversations on science or on history, very dry, often, to the young pupil, who sits down with rapture afterwards to read of modern visions and miracles, of guardian angels visibly appearing, of speaking trees and talking birds, of dark rivers flowing

over golden sands, and miraculous flowers, that droop when a child is naughty, and hold up their heads again as soon as he becomes good. These "very pretty books" have generally a frontispiece, resembling those prints and images now so sadly in vogue for schoolrooms and nurseries, in which a visible guardian angel leads a child onwards, “with upturned eyes," who is evidently walking straight to Rome. These are the fairy tales of the present day, but written with a purpose; and that purpose is anything but Protestant!

The object of Romanism is, entirely to subjugate the will and the intellect; therefore, as Niebuhr says of the Italians, their slavish subjection to the Church is "ghastly death." He adds, "I am perfectly correct in saying that, even among the laity, you cannot discover a vestige of piety. The life of the Italian is little more than an animal one, and he is not much better than an ape endowed with speech. There is nowhere a spark of originality or truthfulness. Slavery and misery have even extinguished all acute susceptibility to sensual enjoyments; and there is, I am sure, no people on the face of the earth more thoroughly ennuyé, and more oppressed with a sense of their own

existence, than the Romans. Their whole life is a vegetation." Thus it becomes with all nations, or individuals, whose misfortune it is to fall under the tuition of Papal tyranny. May English girls long remain in the free and happy exercise of that mental and personal liberty in a domestic home, of which none can deprive them, unless they deprive themselves, by heedlessly venturing among the rocks and quicksands of Romanism, which they will now be often asked to do, probably in a tone of mere jest perhaps at first to hear some very fine singing, or to meet some very eminent Popish dignitary; but it all turns to very serious earnest at last. A girl who blindly rushes into conventual life, reduces herself to the same state as if every relative God ever gave her had died in a day; and it were well to pause till she has come to very mature judgment, before venturing beyond the help of old and tried friends, into the power of those who sell and buy pardons for any offence.

In England, the friends of the most abject criminal, or the most delirious maniac, may gain uncontrolled access to certify that she is treated with kindness and propriety; besides

which indispensable protection, the inmates of a prison, or of a lunatic asylum, have the inestimable privilege of being occasionally visited by the authorized Crown officers, to take legal proof that they are either justly or willingly incarcerated; but a convent is the only spot in her Majesty's wide dominions to which the law of British liberty does not extend. It is better, perhaps, for the community that those whose minds have got into a morbid state, should thus voluntarily imprison themselves while the delusion lasts, but care should be taken, that if cured, they can emerge into liberty again. In Italy it is considered that where the manners are so dissolute, the only safety for "unprotected females" is in a convent; but experience has shown, that the propriety of Englishwomen can be preserved in their own families, without having recourse to solitary imprisonment. The Protestants are one great anti-slavery society, anxious to preserve for all men that "liberty wherewith Christ makes his people free," but the Papists make their votaries, bodily and mentally, slaves, who buy liberty in this world to sin, and in another world an escape from the punishment of having sinned.