d
vista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those old
winter afternoons. Of scarce less moment than these were our frequent
visits, in the same general connection, to the old Pantheon of Oxford
Street, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place of
fine rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity, at the
end of long walks, for the consumption of buns and ginger-beer, and
above all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R.
Haydon. We must at one time quite have haunted the Pantheon, where we
doubtless could better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, to
ruminative rest: Haydon's huge canvases covered the walls--I wonder
what has become now of The Banishment of Aristides, attended to the city
gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which,
especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at the
all-too-just, stares out at me still. We found in these works remarkable
interest and beauty, the reason of which was partly, no doubt, that we
hung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the hapless
artist's Autobiography, then a new book, which our father, indulgent to
our preoccupation, had provided us with; but I blush to risk the further
surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic, in Haydon,
came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended as
"old," who, at the National Gallery, seemed to meet us so little
half-way, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that
_we_ could do, or could at least want to. The beauty of Haydon was just
that he was new, shiningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhaps
in some happy future emulate his big bravery there was nothing so
impossible about it. If we adored daubing we preferred it _fresh_, and
the genius of the Pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Rubens
and Titian were not. Even the charm of the Pantheon yielded, however, to
that of the English collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, then
arrayed at Marlborough House and to which the great plumed and draped
and dusty funeral car of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractive
adjunct. The ground-floor chambers there, none of them at that time
royally inhabited, come back to me as altogether bleak and bare and as
owing their only dignity to Maclise, Mulready and Landseer, to David
Wilkie and Charles Leslie. _They_ were, by some deep-seated English
mystery, the real