298 Letter on. Affairs in. general. [Sepr. 
o«p Apart from, the endeayours. of the Catholics, to which I adverted 
above, the, church) of. England—really and. actually—seems to.be.in 
danger.,. For the ringing of the bells in Bow-steeple, has frightened a 
great stone| down off the church, right through the roof of .a next-door 
neighbour’s house. Now, I do not believe (myself) that, the Papists 
had, any direct hand in this. But still the ringing of bells is an old 
Popish custom: and—we see what comes of it. For my,own part, I 
must. freely confess—what any bells should be kept constantly, or 
periodically, ringing, in any civilized. country for—unless it were to 
frighten, all the cats out of a neighbourhood—I never could conceive. 
‘The true commendation of such music always seemed.to.me to lie in 
the last two lines of that admirable song— The Barber of Liquorpond- 
street,’—to the writer of which be all honour.and glory :— 
“ While St. Andrew’s brave bells did so loud and so clearing, 
‘* You ’d have given ten pounds—to be out of their hearing!” &e; 
One of the clearest points upon which the Turks seemed to me 
“always to have an advantage over the Christians, was that they used 
no bells, either in their churches or houses. Another taste they have 
-too which might. afford an admirable hint to a body of Christians 
(seven millions, they say), who shall be nameless—] mean their ab- 
horrence of unnecessary speech. But this is a dreadful affair, the des- 
truction of the Jannissaries—the Mamelukes, too—gone and fled ; and 
improvement talked of; and civilization ; and European dresses; and 
common sense! ‘The last hold that romance had on the earth was in 
Turkey and Egypt: and Heu / the pride of the horse-tails, and the 
glory of the crescent, is departing. 
The glory of the bugs, however, does not seem to be departing; the 
very deuce is in the vermin, I think, this month. There were so many 
in a house in Doughty-street, that the tenants put a kettle of brimstone 
on the fire to destroy them; and burned down half the neighbourhood ‘in 
the course of the experiment. 
~The new Act of Parliament against stealing in gardens has’ been 
giving great offence in its execution ; and all the London papers have 
been full of fulminations against a Mr. Chamberlayne, a clergyman of - 
Dorsetshire, who sent four boys under ten years of age to the tread-mill, 
for robbing him of his apples. It is very easy to bear the loss which 
other persons experience :—the writers in London papers have no 
gardens, for the most part; and are not exposed therefore to the sort 
of attack which they extenuate. Unfortunately, however, we have 
always a great number of people in this country, to whom the profits 
of any description of theft (permitted) would be exceedingly con- 
venient ; and, to decide that any kind of property may be plundered, 
by any kind of persons, with impunity, is to decide that that description 
of property shall no longer continue to exist. Thus, it is an incon- 
venience, and an annoyance, to any gentleman in the country, to have 
his fences broken down, and his trees plundered—the damage committed 
(independent of the nuisance) being of course twenty times beyond the 
value of the plunder carried away. But this is the least part of the 
affair ; because once admit that the garden may be plundered ; and then 
—we have the garden—that is our own—it is to the good—the next 
step, of course, is to the plunder of his house. We hear only, in cases 
like Mr. Chamberlayne’s—the law ‘allows us only to hear—of the ‘sitgle 
fact. Half a dozen boys, at a given time, have stolen a given number 
