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cannot be denied; nor is it the least service which 
poetry renders to mankind, that it redeems them 
from the thraldom of this earthborn prudence. It 
is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by 
_cares for subsistence and physical gratifications, but 
admits, in measures which may be indefinitely en- 
larged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher 
being.” This refinement pervaded his whole cha- 
racter, gave a charm to his domestic habits and 
social pleasures, which stood in place of the lux- 
uries of fortune, and surpassed them. 
“There is one subject,” Sir James observes in 
the preface to his Tour, “ which commonly makes 
a conspicuous figure in all travels to Italy,—the 
absurdities and abuses of the Catholic religion. 
On this head many a Protestant writer seems to 
think himself privileged to let loose every species 
of sarcasm, censure, and calumny, without any 
qualification or distinction. He censures a pre- 
tended infallible church, as if he himself and his 
own mode or fashion of belief alone were really 
infallible: he condemns a persecuting religion, 
while he himself persecutes it more uncharitably 
and unrelentingly with his pen or his tongue, than 
any churchman ever did heretic with fire and fag- 
got; and he execrates those who keep no faith with 
unbelievers, while he betrays the confidence of 
friendship and hospitality, and perverts the kind- 
ness of human nature, (which gets the better even 
of religious antipathies,) into a tool of ridicule 
against those who have exercised it in favour of 
himself. These errors, by far more disgraceful and 
