became in the hands of the French and Italians; for he was such pliable wax that any man, with a plausible story, the argument of which could be deduced from a good motive, might shape him into any form. She begged of him, in particular, to beware of holy hypocrites. What she had read, she told him, of their cruelty and dissoluteness, was yet worse, if possible, than all

the gambols with which the forms of their facetious religion seemed to burlesque its author: or rather, the author of that which they daringly ventured to innovate, and which involved a system of morality mild as mercy, and benignant as his holy name who established it. Above all she cautioned him against convents, and an intercourse with those drones of society the inmates of them, who, from leisure to plan, and inclination to execute, were the perpetrators of every species of profligacy and mischief. Her reading, she said, had induced her to believe that there were more than three hundred thousand cloystered clergy in France, and a proportionable number of females; that the wickedness, the attrocious wickedness carried on within those walls, which were supposed to immure saints, was shockto humanity.
Emma further observed that it could not be supposed that any thing like the licentious infamy of France and Italy could ever have been practised here, because England had, properly speaking, never been the seat of that dangerous religion; but let it be recollected, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, what barbarous, what detestable vestiges of popish profligacy were discovered at the demolishing Netley abbey, and many other convents.—Subterraneous communications for nightly visits

from friars to nuns, and nuns to friars. Hidden infants apparently murdered. If then the plant, which was here an exotic, grew to such perfection, how must it flourish in its native soil. It was horrible to think of it!

'But,' added Emma, if I may credit what I have read, this most unholy, irreverent, indecent, ridiculous religion, is clearly where it exists a jest with all but the superstitious ignorant. What is the mode of choosing a pope but a blasphemous imposition, in which, one would think, to punish them for presumptuously daring to give out that their election is from heaven, they once, by inspiration no doubt, as well as upon all other occasions, chose a woman, who betrayed her sex, their shame, and opened the eyes of every one who chose to see. But vive la bagatelle in that, as in every thing else, soon got the better of good