out that because he made it by flattering the winning side he must have been a saint in disguise. You sneer at my want of 'enthusiasm.' You shudder when you make the remark that enthusiasm was once actually a term of reproach. When we denounced enthusiasts,' we denounced a very bad thing. We thought that the false claimants of supernatural powers must be knaves or fools, and we ventured to say so openly. You think that even a charlatan deserves respect if his stock-in-trade is a comfortable superstition. I, too, could claim enthusiasm in your sense. It was in a moment of 'enthusiasm' that I joined the Church of Rome; and though I always scorned to affect what I did not feel, it was with true 'enthusiasm' that I entered Rome, heard the bare-footed friars singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, and conceived the first crude idea of my great work. Enthusiasm, in my version, lifted me to the regions of philosophy, and separated me from the vulgar herd. It did not mean the discovery of the vox dei in every platform intended to catch the votes of the majority. We did not think ignorance and poverty a sufficient guarantee for political or religious infallibility. But we were not, therefore, as you
