[Isopel Berners by George Borrow]@TWC D-Link book
Isopel Berners

CHAPTER XIII
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Look at the most part of their chapels, no longer modest brick edifices, situated in quiet and retired streets, but lunatic- looking erections, in what the simpletons call the modern Gothic taste, of Portland-stone, with a cross upon the top, and the site generally the most conspicuous that can be found; and look at the manner in which they educate their children, I mean those that are wealthy.

They do not even wish them to be Dissenters, 'the sweet dears shall enjoy the advantages of good society, of which their parents were debarred.' So the girls are sent to tip-top boarding schools, where amongst other trash they read 'Rokeby,' and are taught to sing snatches from that high-flying ditty the 'Cavalier--' 'Would you match the base Skippon, and Massey, and Brown, With the barons of England, who fight for the crown ?'-- he! he! their own names.

Whilst the lads are sent to those hot-beds of pride and folly--colleges, whence they return with a greater contempt for everything 'low,' and especially for their own pedigree, than they went with.

I tell you, friend, the children of Dissenters, if not their parents, are going over to the Church, as you call it, and the Church is going over to Rome." "I do not see the justice of that latter assertion at all," said I; "some of the Dissenters' children may be coming over to the Church of England, and yet the Church of England be very far from going over to Rome." "In the high road for it, I assure you," said the man in black, "part of it is going to abandon, the rest to lose their prerogative, and when a church no longer retains its prerogative, it speedily loses its own respect, and that of others." "Well," said I, "if the higher classes have all the vices and follies which you represent, on which point I can say nothing, as I have never mixed with them; and even supposing the middle classes are the foolish beings you would fain make them, and which I do not believe them as a body to be, you would still find some resistance amongst the lower classes.

I have a considerable respect for their good sense and independence of character; but pray let me hear your opinion of them." "As for the lower classes," said the man in black, "I believe them to be the most brutal wretches in the world, the most addicted to foul feeding, foul language, and foul vices of every kind; wretches who have neither love for country, religion, nor anything save their own vile selves.


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