Why, you may hunt all Surius for such a biography of a mediaeval worthy as Carlyle has given of your Abbot Samson.

I have read, or tried to read your Surius, and Alban Butler, and so forth--and they seemed to me bats and asses--One really pitied the poor saints and martyrs for having such blind biographers--such dunghill cocks, who overlooked the pearl of real human love and nobleness in them, in their greediness to snatch up and parade the rotten chaff of superstition, and self-torture, and spiritual dyspepsia, which had overlaid it.

My dear fellow, that Calendar ruins your cause--you are "sacres aristocrates"-- kings and queens, bishops and virgins by the hundred at one end; a beggar or two at the other; and but one real human lay St.Homobonus to fill up the great gulf between--A pretty list to allure the English middle classes, or the Lancashire working-men!--Almost as charmingly suited to England as the present free, industrious, enlightened, and moral state of that Eternal City, which has been blest with the visible presence and peculiar rule, temporal as well as spiritual, too, of your Dalai Lama.

His pills do not seem to have had much practical effect there.

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