unattainable, just as they were none the less the
directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. I could never have
enough of Maclise's Play-scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finest
composition in the world (though Ophelia did look a little as if cut in
silhouette out of white paper and pasted on;) while as I gazed, and
gazed again, at Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess I pushed through
the great hall of romance to the central or private apartments.
Trafalgar Square had its straight message for us only in the May-time
exhibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, without a home of
its own, to borrow space from the National Gallery--space partly
occupied, in the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of the
Pre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I distinguish Millais's Vale
of Rest, his Autumn Leaves and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigious
Blind Girl. The very word Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity of
meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but
for one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and I may perhaps
somewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception.
Momentous to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858, where there
were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder,
Holman Hunt's Scapegoat most of all, which I remember finding so charged
with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company--_it_ in company and
I the same: I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared to
face it all alone in a room. By that time moreover--I mean by 1858--we
had been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case at least with
W. J., for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 1857, instruction at the
atelier of M. Leon Coigniet, of a limited order and adapted to his
years, had been candidly provided--that M. Leon Coigniet whose Marius
meditating among the Ruins of Carthage impressed us the more, at the
Luxembourg (even more haunted by us in due course than the Pantheon had
been,) in consequence of this family connection.

Let me not, however, nip the present thread of our aesthetic evolution
without a glance at that comparatively spare but deeply appreciated
experience of the London theatric privilege which, so far as occasion
favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiarities
had to drop; going to the play presented itself in London as a serious,
ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving c