the unhappy traveller. You look at all this through the grated window; there is just light enough to make it solemnly and distinctly visible, and to read in it a powerful record of mental and physical agony, and of maternal love in death. That little child, hiding its face in its mother's bosom, and both frozen to death ;one can never forget the group, nor the memento mori, nor the token of deathless love.

CHAPTER XVI,

Descent into the Val d'Aoste.-Romish Intolerance, and that of
State and Church.

WE leave the Hospice with regret, but it is quite too cold to remain. The view on both sides, both the Italian and the Swiss side, is very grand, though you see nothing but countless ridges of mountains. The snowy Velan is an object of great magnificence. On the Italian side, we first circle the little lake, the centre of which is the boundary line between Savoy and the Canton Vallais, within which the Hospice stands. Then a rapid winding descent speedily brings the traveller from the undisputed domain of ice and granite first to the mosses, then the scant grass, then the mountain shrubs, then the stunted larches, then the fir forests, and last the luxuriant vineyards and chestnut verdure of the Val d'Aoste. It were endless to enumerate the wild and beautiful windings of the route, the openings from it, the valleys of picturesque beauty which run off among the mountains, and the grandeur of the view of Mont Blanc, when you again encounter it. The first village from the Hospice is that of St. Remy, where the sentinel of the Bureau carefully examined the contents of my knapsack.

Taking up my crimson guide-book, he remarked that he supposed it was a book of prayer. I told him no, but showed him my pocket epistle to the Romans. John Murray's guide-book might very well be denominated the Englishman's prayer-book on the continent, for everybody has it in his hand, morning, noon, and night. What does Mr. Murray say? is the question that decides everything on the road. At the inns, when you come down to breakfast in the morning, besides a cup of coffee, an egg, and a roll, your traveller has his Murray at his plate, open at the day's route before him. If he is a genuine Irishman, you may expect

And when, fatigued,

him to take a bite at it, instead of his bread. you sit down at tea in the evening, there is John Murray again in his scarlet binding. The book looked very like a mass-book to the sentinel, and certainly, it being always the first thing that met his sight in every pocket, trunk, or knapsack, if he made, with every English traveller that crossed the mountain that summer, the same mistake that he did with me, he must have thought the English a wonderfully devout people.

But perhaps, if I had told him it was my prayer-book or Bible, he would have taken it away from me. For this was the very place where an English gentleman, whom I afterwards met at Geneva, travelling with his daughter, had their English Bible and prayer-book both taken from them, in obedience to an edict that had just been issued by the Sardinian police, in regard to all books on the frontier. He made a great storm about it, and would not give them up, till he had compelled the officer to sign a receipt for them under his own name, telling him at the same time that he should report the affair to the English ambassador at Turin, when he would soon know if Englishmen were to be insulted in that way. The consequence was that after his return to Geneva he received his prayer-book and Bible safe and sound, restored by the authorities. The encyclical letter of the Pope had frightened the Sardinian government into unusual jealousy, that season, against the scriptures. But if I had made a detour a little out of the village, I could have carried half a hundred weight of Bibles into Sardinia unmolested. Strange to say, my passport was not demanded, and it was only because, being on foot, the passport officer did not happen to be watching when I passed.

In six hours from the Hospice you reach the lovely valley, where, beneath a southern sun and sky, are spread the vineyards and the Cité D'Aoste. Few scenes are more refreshingly beautiful than the rich chestnut and walnut foliage, which marks your proximity to the city; in a few hours you have gone from the extreme of coldness and sterility amidst eternal ice and snow, to that of an almost tropical warmth and luxuriance of vegetation. It was Saturday evening about eight o'clock, when I reached te Hotel de la Vallée. The sunset was superb, and you could se

at once the Grand St. Bernard and Mont Blanc filling their different quarters of the horizon, and throwing back from their crimsoned snowy summits the last rays of light. My hotel I found most excellent, mine host a Swiss and a Protestant, he and his family forming the only four Protestant individuals in all the city.

Next after Rome, it is in the kingdom of Savoy, under the Piedmontese government and administration, that the Romish Clergy and the Jesuits have obtained the most absolute power. They exclude the people, as far as possible, from the knowledge of the scriptures, and watch against the introduction of heretical books with a quarantine more strict than the laws of the Orient against the Plague. Nevertheless, the labors of the colporteurs and

others do now and then sow the seed of the Word of God successfully. Then cometh the devil and taketh it away. A young Savoyard, a poor little chimney-sweep, purchased one day a Testament, for which he paid ten sous, and set himself immediately to read it. Delighted to possess the Word of God, he ran to the priest, in his simplicity, to show him the good bargain he had made with his savings. The priest took the book, and told the young Savoyard that it came from the hands of heretics, and that it was a book forbidden to be read. The peasant replied that everything he had read in the book told him about Christ, and, besides, said he, it is so beautiful! You shall see how beautiful it is, said the priest, seizing it, and cast it into the fire. The young Savoyard went away weeping.

I will be tolerant of everything, said Coleridge, except every other man's intolerance. This is a good rule. The worst thing in controversy is its tendency to engender an intolerant spirit. To be much in it, is like eating Lucifer matches for your daily food. What was intended to strike light gets into the bowels, gives a if such man the colic, and makes him sour and mad. Nay more, food be persisted in, it sets his tongue on fire of hell, makes him a living spit-fire, a walking quarrel, an antagonism incarnate. Controversy, as a religious necessity of earnest contention for the faith once delivered to the saints, is a great and sacred duty, and good and blessed in its place with love, but it is bad as a habit. Without love, it is a beast that throws its rider, even if he gets

fairly into the saddle, which he seldom does, for he almost always o'erleaps himself, and falls on the other side.

But, what shall be said of controversy against a system, that would take the Bread of Life from men's tables, and shut them up in prison for distributing and reading it? Is it not a sacred duty of humanity? Yea, it is; no man can receive such an account of the intolerance of this system as the following (which I shall tell as it was given to me in writing), without a feeling of the deepest indignation.

It was of M. Pache, of the village of Morges, in Switzerland, a Minister of the Gospel, and a member of one of the most respectable families of the whole country, who was sojourning, during the summer, for his health, at the baths of Aix, in Savoy. He was so ill that he was often shut up in his chamber, and obliged to keep his bed. An old woman had the care of him as his nurse, a creature as cunning and malicious as she was bigoted. She soon observed, by his conversation and manner of life, that M. Pache was a religious man, although, knowing the jealousy of the priests, he had prudently abstained from giving her either Bibles or Tracts. This, however, did not prevent the old woman from going to her priest, and telling him, it is said at the confessional, all that she had seen or heard of her patient's heresy.

The priest took the alarm, but M. Pache could not be arrested without some plausible pretext, and how should that be gained? Under guidance of her Confessor, the old woman pretended to her patient to be filled with a very sincere and earnest desire to be instructed as to the interests of her soul. She entered into conversation with M. Pache, and finished by begging him to give her one or two of the religious tracts which she had seen upon his table. The sick man yielded to her request-for who, not knowing her wicked league with the priest, could have refused it?

Soon as the old woman had got possession of the tracts, she ran in triumph to carry them to the priest. M. Pache was at once arrested and conducted to prison. Some influential friends exerted themselves to obtain his liberation, but in vain; they were told that M. Pache must wait in prison the issuing of his judgment. The prisoner next addressed a petition to the King of Sardinia, with whom he had been personally acquainted, had lived with him