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A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate of it in my judgment it was.
A man, by hearing all this nonsense lumped and preached together, confounds the God of the Creation with the imagined God of the Christians, and lives as if there were none. Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity.
In the heart of the city of London, in its noblest edifices, on the Lord's day, repeated instances have been known that a single individual hath not attended the divine service. Another writer observes, in similar language, that 'the greater part of our churches, particularly in the metropolis, present a most unedifying and afflicting spectacle to the eyes of the sincere, unenthusiastic Christian. 'Attendance was almost everywhere, he adds, 'most shamefully small. Some of the remoter parts of England seemed to be absolutely in danger of relapsing into literal heathenism.
Sometimes Cecile told me some of these, and very unedifying they were, acting ghosts in the passages, fastening up the cell doors, ringing the bells at unearthly hours, putting brushes or shoes in the beds, and the like practical jokes.
He saw the heady young squires of the Alföld idle away their time at school in unedifying contrast to the diligent sober conduct of himself and his friends, and yet the masters treated them with the greatest distinction. Some of them scarcely attended the lectures at all, and yet they sat on the front benches.
I did hear of one parish at the West End the very same, by the way, I just now commended for sticking to the "penny" system where Hood's "Nelly Gray," proposed to be read by the son of one of our best known actors, was tabooed as "unedifying." Lazarus does not come to be "edified," but to be amused.
I presume, however, that the display is a compliment. November 26th. Noon. We have just had another sample of this very unedifying Chinese warfare. As we neared a pagoda, surrounded by a crenelated wall, we were fired upon two or three times. We thought it necessary to resent this affront by peppering the place for about ten minutes.
I remember very little else of that evening than the coup d'oeil I have mentioned; besides, were my memory more retentive, I might scruple to trespass farther on my reader's patience, by the detail of those pleasures, which, like love-letters, however agreeable to the parties immediately concerned, are very unedifying to all others.
Yet she insisted on calling herself a professional, because singing was her profession, and society thought this so strange that it at once became suspicious and invented wild and unedifying stories about her; and the reporters haunted the lobby of her hotel, and gossiped with their friends the detectives, who also spent much time there in a professional way for the general good, and were generally what English workmen call wet smokers.
It was Etta Clavering who conducted Betty round the village shops on the morning after her arrival, where she was introduced to the small Scottish shopkeeper getting rich quick, and the unedifying revelation of naked greed cringing behind every tiny counter. Through Eileen Cavendish, moreover, she secured the goodwill of a washerwoman. "My dear," said her benefactress, "money won't tempt them.
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