[A reminiscence of Browning in "The Bishop Orders his Tomb":—
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long.]
I must have a strong strain of Puritan blood in me somewhere, for I am possessed with a desire to arise and slay the whole brood of idolators whenever I assist at one of these ceremonies. You will observe that I am decidedly better, and have a capacity for a good hatred still.
The last news about Gordon is delightful. The chances are he will rescue Wolseley yet.
With our love.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[To his eldest son.]
Rome, January 20, 1885.
I need hardly tell you that I find Rome wonderfully interesting, and the attraction increases the longer one stays. I am obliged to take care of myself and do but little in the way of sight-seeing, but by directing one's attention to particular objects one can learn a great deal without much trouble. I begin to understand Old Rome pretty well, and I am quite learned in the Catacombs, which suit me, as a kind of Christian fossils out of which one can reconstruct the body of the primitive Church. She was a simple maiden enough and vastly more attractive than the bedizened old harridan of the modern Papacy, so smothered under the old clothes of Paganism which she has been appropriating for the last fifteen centuries that Jesus of Nazareth would not know her if he met her.