Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/198

 "She behaves very prettily, and with great affection to the people with whom she is living," says Miss Carter. "One of the reasons she assigns for her fondness is that they give her enough food, which she represents as a deficient article in the workhouse; and says that on Fridays particularly she never had any dinner. Surely the parish officers have not made a Papist the mistress! If this is not the case, the loss of one dinner in a week is of no great consequence."

To the poor hungry child it was probably of much greater consequence than the theological bias of the matron. Nor does a dinnerless Friday appear the surest way to win youthful converts to the fold. But devout ladies who had read Canon Seward's celebrated tract on the "Comparison between Paganism and Popery" (in which he found little to choose between them) were well on their guard against the insidious advances of Rome. "When I had no religion at all," confesses Cowper to Lady Hesketh, "I had yet a terrible dread of the Pope." The worst to be apprehended from Methodists was their lamentable tendency to enthusiasm, and