and, by enfeebling the reason with the mixed operations of horror, wonder, and reverence, to fit the credulous for the reception of every imposition, however gross in conception, or bungled in execution. Those are the things which constituted the greatness and splendor of the cities of ancient Christendom; to those has the sturdiest human vigour and intellect been forced to bend the knees: they were built to endure the outrages of time; and will stand, I am sure, long, long after their power shall have been annihilated.

What a powerful engine has superstition been, in the cunning management of priests! How lamentable it is to think, that not only all who believed, but all who had good sense enough not to believe, should, for so many centuries, have been kept in prostrate submission to the will and dominion of an old man in Rome!-My blushes for the folly and supineness of mankind, however, are lost in a warm glow of transport at the present irradiation of the human mind; and though I can scarcely think with patience of that glorious, godlike being, HENRY the Second of England, being obliged by the Pope to lash himself naked at the tomb of that saucy, wicked priest, THOMAS A BECKET, I felicitate myself with the reflection, that the Pope is now the most contemptible sovereign in Europe, and that the Papal authority, which was once the terror and the scourge of the earth, is now not only not recognised, but seldom thought of, and, when thought of, only serves to excite laughter or disgust.

LETTER VII.

THE town of Bruges, although the streets be, as I have already described them, so mean, narrow, dirty, and irregular in general, contains, nevertheless, some few streets that are tolerable, and a few squares also that are far from contemptible. I should think it, nevertheless, not worth another letter of description, were it not

that the churches, and church-curiosities, demand our attention; for you will observe, that in all rich Popish countries, every church is a holy toy-shop, or rather a museum, where pictures, statues, gold cups, silver candlesticks, diamond crucifixes, and gods, of various sorts and dimensions, are hoarded up, in honour of the Supreme Being. This city having been for centuries the see of a bishop, who is suffragan to the archbishop of Mecklin, and at the same time hereditary chancellor of Flanders, it is not to be wondered at, if ecclesiastical industry should have amassed some of those little trinkets which constitute the chief or only value of their church. The mitre of this place conveys to the head that wears it a diocese containing six cities, from the names of which you will be able to form some small judgment of the opulence of one poor son of abstinence and mortification. Those cities are, in the first place, Bruges itself, then Ostend, Sluys, Damme, Middleburgh in Flanders, and Oudenberch-not to mention one hun dred and thirty-three boroughs and villages; and if you. could compute the number of inferior clergy with which the streets and highways are filled, you would be thunderstruck. There, and in all, those Popish countries, they may be seen, with grotesque habits and bald pates, buzzing up and down like bees, in swarms, (a precious hive!) and, with the most vehement protestations of voluntary poverty in their mouths, and eyes uplifted to heaven, scrambling for the good things of the earth with the eagerness of a pack of hounds, and the rapacity of a whole roll of lawyers! With loaded thighs (1 might say, loaded arms too, for they have large pockets even in their sleeves, for the concealment of moveables) they return to the great hive, where, contrary to the law of bees, the drone lives in idle state, and he plunders them; contrary, too, to the habits of those useful insects, they banish the queen-bee, and suffer no female to approach their cells, but keep them in contiguous hives, where, under cover of the night, they visit them, and fulfil in private that which they deny in public-the great command of Providence.

The first building in nominal rank, though by no means the first in value, is the great cathedral, which has at least bulk, antiquity, and gloominess enough to recommend it to the faithful. It is by no means unfurnished within, though not in so remarkable a manner as to induce me to fill a letter with it. In a word, it is an old Popish cathedral, and cannot be supposed wanting in wealth at the time I write, it has been standing no less a time than nine hundred and twenty-nine years, having been built in the year 865.

The next that occurs to me, as worthy of notice, is the church of Notre Dame, or that dedicated to our Lady the Virgin MARY. This is really a beautiful structure of the kind-indeed magnificent. Its steeple is beyond conception stupendous, being so very high as to be seen at sea off Ostend, although it is not elevated in the smallest degree by any rise in the ground; for, so very flat is the whole intermediate country, that I believe it would puzzle a skilful leveller to find two feet elevation from high-water-mark at Ostend up to this city. The contents of this church are correspondent to its external appearance-being enriched and beautified with a vast variety of sacerdotal trinkets, and fine tombs and monuments. As to the former, the vestments of the same THOMAS A BECKET whom I mentioned in my last, make a part of the curiosities deposited in this church: this furious and inflexible impostor was archbishop of Canterbury; and his struggles to enslave both the king and people of England, and make them tributary to the Pope, have canonized him, and obtained the very honourable depot I mentioned for his vestments. To do justice, however, to the spirit and sagacity of the holy fathers who have so long taken the pains to preserve them, it must be commemorated, that they are, or at least were set with diamonds, and other precious stones! Probably, among the many priests who have, in so many centuries, had the custody of those divine relics, some one, more sagacious than the rest, might conceive, that, to lie in a church, and be seen by the all-believing eyes of the faithful, a little coloured glass was just as good as any precious stone, and wisely have converted the

If so, it will be some

originals to some better purpose. consolation to Holy Mother Church to reflect, that she has bilked the Sans-culottes, who certainly have got possession of Saint THOMAS A BECKET's sacerdotal petticoats; and, if they have been sound enough to stand the cutting, have, by this time, converted them into comfortable campaigning breeches. O monstrous! wicked! abominable! that the Royal MARY, sister to the great Emperor CHARLES the Fifth, should, so long ago as the Reformation, have bought at an immense price, and deposited in the treasury of the church of our Lady the blessed Virgin MARY, the vestments of a saint, only to make breeches, in the year 1794, for a French soldier! The time has been, when the bare suggestion of such sacrilege would have turned the brain of half the people of Christendom: but those things are now better managed.

Of the tombs in this church, I shall only mention two, as distinguished from the rest by their costliness, magnificence, and antiquity. They are made of copper, well gilt. One of them is the tomb of MARY, heiress to the Ducal House of Burgundy; and the other, that of CHARLES, (commonly called the Hardy,) Duke of Bur gundy, her father.

In Bruges there were four great abbeys, and an amazing number of convents and nunneries. The buildings, I presume, yet stand; but there is little doubt that their contents, of every kind, have been, before this, put in requisition, and each part of them, of course, applied to its natural use.

The church once belonging to the Jesuits, is built in a noble style of architecture: and that of the Dominicans has not only its external merits, but its internal value; for, besides the usual superabundance of rich chalices, &c. it possesses some very great curiosities

As, first, a very curious, highly wrought pulpitbeautiful in itself, but remarkable for the top being supported by wood, cut out in the most natural, deceptive manner, in the form of ropes, and which beguile the spectator the more into a belief of its reality, because it answers the purposes of ropes.

D

Secondly, a picture-and so extraordinary a picture Before I describe it, I must apprise you that your faith must be almost as great as that of a Spanish Christian to believe me to believe that the human intellect ever sunk so low as, in the first instance, to conceive, and, in the next, to harbour and admire, such a piece. But I mistake it has its merit; it is a curiosity the demon of satire himself could not wish for a greater.

This picture, then, is the representation of a marriage but of whom? why, truly, of JESUS CHRIST with Saint CATHARINE of Sienna. Observe the congruity Saint CATHARINE of Sienna lived many centuries after the translation of JESUS CHRIST to Heaven, where he is to sit, you know, till he comes to judge the quick and the dead!But who marries them? In truth, Saint DOMINIC, the patron of this church! the Virgin MARY joins their hands-that is not amiss-But, to crown the whole, King DAVID himself, who died sa long before CHRIST was born, plays the harp at the wedding!

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My dear FREDERICK, I shall take it as no small instance of your dutiful opinion of me to believe, that such a picture existed, and made part of the holy paraphernalia of a temple consecrated to the worship of the Divinity but I assure you it is a fact; and as I have never given you reason to suspect my veracity, I expect you to believe me in this instance, improbable.though it seems for such a farrago of absurdities, such a jum-. ble of incongruities, impossibilities, bulls, and anachronisms, never yet were compressed, by the human imagina tion, into the same narrow compass.

I protract this letter beyond my usual length, on purpose to conclude my account of Bruges, and get once more upon the road.

The monastery of the Carthusians, another order of friars, is of amazing size, covering an extent of ground not much less than a mile in circumference, The Carmelites, another order, have a church here, in which there is raised a beautiful monument, to the memory of HENRY JERMYN, Lord Dover, a peer of England. But the monastery called the Dunes, a sect of the order.