was many, many years after Roger Ascham's praiseworthy flight from Italy that we find Patty More, sister to the ever-virtuous Hannah, writing apprehensively to a friend:—
"What is to become of us? All the world, as it seems, flying off to France, that land of deep corruption and wickedness, made hotter in sin by this long and dreadful Revolution. The very curates in our neighbourhood have been. I fear a deterioration in the English character is taking place. The Ambassador's lady in Paris could not introduce the English ladies till they had covered up their bodies."
This sounds rather as though England were corrupting France. Perhaps, notwithstanding the truly reprehensible conduct of the curates,—for whom no excuse can be made,—the exodus was not so universal as the agitated Mrs. Patty seemed to think. There were still plenty of stay-at-homes, lapped in rural virtues, and safe from contamination;—like the squire who told Jane Austen's father that he and his wife had been quarrelling the night before as to whether Paris were in France, or France in Paris. The "Roman Priest Conversion Branch
